The practice of careful burial, to which the primeval megalithic monuments bear witness, also reveals early man trying to create, to outlast the brief span of his life. This sense of time, the awareness that countless others have come before and that others will follow in endless generations, distinguishes man from other animals. With this discovery of the meaning of death—that man’s own life is limited—the life of architecture begins. And so begins man the creator’s effort to conquer time.
Megalithic tombs were built in well-defined styles. There were “passage” graves in which a central stone-built chamber is approached through a long narrow passage, all covered by a circular mound of earth. And there were chamber tombs, or “gallery” graves where the burial chamber is entered directly. Besides, there were long corridors built of megaliths (allée couverte), and rows of standing stones, or single standing menhirs. All were symptoms of man’s yearning for immortality, his calculated effort by creating to rescue his person from the ravages of time.
Millennia later, when we study these remains we prove the success of those earliest architects. But their success was ambiguous and megaliths became vehicles of myth. It was said that Saint Patrick, in the fifth century, came upon a passage grave some 120 feet in length. According to a sacred text of the saint’s life, the people said, “We do not believe this affair, that there was a man of this length.” To which Saint Patrick replied, “If you wish you shall see him.” He touched his crozier to a stone near the head of the grave, made the sign of the cross, and said, “Open, O Lord, the grave.” The earth opened, the stones separated, and the buried giant arose. “Blessed be you, O holy man,” said the giant weeping, “for you have raised me even for one hour from many pains. I will walk with you.” “We cannot allow you to walk with us,” the people exclaimed, “for men cannot look upon your face for fear of you. But believe in the God of Heaven and accept the baptism of the Lord, and you shall return to the place in which you were. And tell us of whom you are.” The giant explained that he had been swineherd to the king and was slain by enemy warriors just one hundred years before on that very day. “And he was baptized and confessed God, and he fell silent, and was placed once more in his grave.”
The ancient barrow graves attracted a fantastic variety of inhabitants. Beowulf, the Old English epic (c. eighth century), reported a dragon who lived in a chambered barrow guarding a rich treasure. Geoffrey of Monmouth (d.1155), one of the most popular (and most inventive) historians of the Middle Ages, celebrated Stonehenge. His Historia regum Britanniae (1135–1139) told how Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, and his followers had settled Britain and exterminated the native giants. Later, the Jute invaders Hengist and Horsa conquered the land by treacherously cutting the throats of the four hundred and sixty native British princes whom they then buried on the Salisbury plain.
Geoffrey’s story climaxed in the glorious conquests of King Arthur, aided by his resourceful court magician Merlin. One day when Merlin and King Arthur visited the grim Salisbury plain, Merlin proposed a grand memorial like the Dance of the Giants, a structure of enormous stones in Ireland. And why not bring those very same stones across the water to make a monumental circle in this place and “here shall they stand for ever”? When the king laughed, Merlin replied, “Laugh not so lightly … in these stones is a mystery.” Ancient giants, he explained, had brought the great stones “from the furthest ends of Africa” and they had a certain “virtue of witchcraft.” Geoffrey recounted how Merlin used his magic to transport and reerect the Dance of the Giants on Salisbury plain, where they became Stonehenge, which never lost Merlin’s magic.
When King James I visited Stonehenge in 1620 he ordered the famous architect and set designer Inigo Jones (1573–1652) to draw a plan of the monument and explain how it had been built. Jones concluded that “Stonehenge was no work of the Druids, or of the ancient Britons; the learning of the Druids consisting more in contemplation than practice, and the ancient Britons accounting it their chiefest glory to be wholly ignorant in whatever Arts.” Stonehenge then must have been the work of the Romans, for they alone had the required technology.
Forty years later, John Aubrey (1626–1697), who lived near Stonehenge, reviewed the monument for King Charles II (reigned 1660–85). He explored the site and so became known as England’s first archaeologist. The ring of cavities he discovered came to be called Aubrey Holes. In them, supposedly, other stones had once been placed. Dating the structure long before Roman or Saxon times, Aubrey suggested:
That the Druids being the most eminent Priests, or Order of Priests, among the Britaines; ’tis odds, but that these ancient monuments … were Temples of the Priests of the most eminent Order, viz. Druids, and … are as ancient as those times. This Inquiry, I must confess, is a gropeing in the Dark … although I have brought it from an utter darkness to a thin mist, and have gone further in this Essay than any one before me …
Besides the Druids there were plenty of other contenders—including the “Cerngick giants,” who may have built Stonehenge as a “triumphal tropical temple.” John Dryden (1631–1700) himself applauded such speculation:
… you may well give
To Men new vigour, who make Stones to live.
Through you, the Danes (their short Dominion Lost)
A longer conquest that the Saxons boast.
Stone-Heng, once thought a Temple, you have found
A Throne, where Kings, our Earthly Gods, were crown’d.…
Druids, imaginary and real, would never cease to haunt Stonehenge. They seem to have won the battle of the legends. Julius Caesar’s vivid description of Druid rituals and human sacrifices in his Gallic Wars was embellished by Pliny. But there really were Druids, a priestly class among the ancient Celts. Their name came from their word for tree, probably the oak, in the forests where they performed their rituals. The real Druids were already familiar in Gaul and may have come to Britain with the Celts in about the fifth century B.C. Emperor Tiberius suppressed their rituals in Britain in the first century but nostalgia for the Druids survived.
Their most persuasive champion was a friend of Sir Isaac Newton who was a man of science, a Cambridge-trained physician and Fellow of the Royal Society, Dr. William Stukeley (1687–1765). His popular book, Stonehenge, a temple restored to the British Druids (1740), sought to “make our moderns ashamed, to wink in the sun-shine of learning and religion,” and sang a paean to the Druids’ wondrous “patriarchal” powers, which he traced back to Abraham. But he did make some useful observations. Measuring the distances between the positions for stones he came up with a “druid cubit” (20.8 inches), their unit of length, and sketched the site in detail so “if it ever happen, that this noble work should be destroyed: the spot of it may be found by these views.”
Stukeley’s awe of the learned Druids led him to the fertile suggestion that the axis of Stonehenge aimed precisely at the point of midsummer sunrise. He found that “the principle line of the whole work” was directed to that point in “the northeast, where abouts the sun rises, when the days are longest.” Later research revealed that the stones were also oriented toward the cycles of the moon. The celestial wanderings of the moon, which shift in periods of 18.6 years, are much more complicated than those of the sun. The four Station Stones appeared to be lined upon the two extremes of the midsummer moonrise. Now archaeologists agree that Stonehenge was indeed some kind of observatory, subtly oriented to the motions of the sun and the moon.
For pious medieval Christians megaliths were a menace. From Nantes (658), in a part of France where many megaliths survived, a Church decree commanded “Bishops and their servants to dig up and remove and hide to places where they cannot be found, those stones which in remote and woody places are still worshipped and where vows are still made.” Charlemagne, King Alfred, and Canute all issued edicts against the idolatry of megaliths. But gradually it appeared that these monuments of pagan magic could be made to serve Christian piety. Megaliths which could not be moved or hid
den or destroyed could readily be Christianized. An incised crucifix or a small stone cross affixed to the top of a menhir did the job. The great stones of the megalithic tombs were incorporated into chapels and churches and Christian tombs seen today in France, Spain, and Portugal.
As fear of pagan magic dwindled, megaliths became landscape fantasies, “follies,” and grottoes, adding delight to country estates. Imitation Stonehenges and mock-megaliths were ordered by wealthy gentlemen to enliven country walks for their weekend visitors. In the 1820s a public-spirited gentleman of Yorkshire, William Danby (1752–1833), instead of giving handouts to the local unemployed, paid each a shilling a day to help him build the impressive Druids’ temple that still survives. When Field Marshal Henry Seymour Conway (1721–1795) who commanded British troops in the last years of the American war, left his post as governor of Jersey, the grateful inhabitants offered him as a going-away present a megalithic monument discovered on the island in 1785. His gratitude was tempered when he discovered that he would have to pay for transporting the enormous stones across the water to his house outside Henley. But that he did and the prehistoric megaliths still lend their magic to a hill overlooking the Thames.
10
Castles of Eternity
OF the Seven Wonders of the World, famous in antiquity, only the oldest, the Pyramids, has survived. The ancient Egyptians have won their battle against time. We wonder that monuments elsewhere outlast the centuries, but the Egyptian world seems changeless. The perpetual sun and the annual rhythm of the rising Nile declare continuity of life as vivid to us as it was to the ancient Egyptians. Their message from 2700 B.C. still comes in the Pyramids. Why could not man himself be changeless, and go on living forever? They built cities of the dead for people who would never die. Where we see the lifeless dead, ancient Egyptians saw endless life. “O King N thou art not gone dead,” reads the Pyramid text, “Thou art gone alive.”
Eternal life needed an eternal dwelling. The earliest Egyptians built houses of reeds. And by the period of the Pyramids, their houses were built of sun-dried brick, which also have gone with the wind. But now we see those Egyptians as great stone builders. Their indestructible dwellings for the dead became castles of eternity.
While the words of their optimism, their belief in life everlasting, remain arcane and elude us, their stones still publish their faith in the equality of the dead with the living. Egyptian tomb paintings make their daily life more vivid than that of any other ancient people. We see them eating and drinking, irrigating their fields, cultivating and harvesting, hunting and fishing; we see them dancing and sculpting and building. We see their children playing four thousand years ago. Sepulchral stele ask prayers for the deceased from all passersby. “O ye who live and exist, who love life and hate death.…”
Abhorrence of death somehow did not lead them to fear the dead or worship ancestors. Tomb robbery could hardly have been so prevalent in all periods if the Egyptians had been haunted by fear of the dead. Excavators almost never find an unrobbed tomb. The Egyptian way was not to fear death but to deny it. They insisted on the similarity of the needs of “men, gods, and dead.” Like the living prince’s royal “house of the living,” the temple was “the god’s castle,” and the tomb was everyman’s castle. There the owner lived on and his possessions were stored.
Because the dead had reason to fear the living, the jewel-adorned mummies were hidden in deep tomb shafts. Inscribed on the walls of the chamber and the sides of the sarcophogus were spells against intruders. Even the hieroglyphs of men and animals drawn to protect and serve the deceased might be threatening. To make these harmless, the ambivalent tomb artists of the Old Kingdom sometimes would take off legs or bodies, or even chop them in half. To feed the tenants of these hidden apartments, tomb architects of the Age of the Pyramids built over the burial shaft another structure, a mastaba, with a false door leading to a life-sized statue of the deceased to receive the food offerings. To ensure a continuous supply of food after death, noblemen set aside land as an endowment for priests to feed them. The better-furnished tombs of the Second Dynasty even contained washbasins and privies.
The relations of the dead to the living were sometimes too intimate for comfort. Since the invisible spirit “comes in darkness and enters slinking in,” the malicious dead could do their mischief undetected. But the loving dead could continue to help. Ancient Egyptians wrote letters to deceased parents asking their support and their protection. To the unfriendly dead they wrote letters begging them to go away. In a touching letter from the Twentieth Dynasty, a distressed widower recalls how faithful he had been during his life and begs his dead wife to stop her mischievous tricks. “I did not give thee pain through anything that I did. Nor didst thou find me flouting thee by behaving like a peasant and entering into a strange house.… I did the thing that a man in my position usually does as regards thy ointment, thy provisions and thy clothes, and I did not dispose of them elsewhere on the pretext that ‘the woman is away.’ ” In her last illness he had employed a master physician, on her death had mourned for eight months, had limited his food and drink, and then for three years remained celibate. Why, since her death, had she inflicted all sorts of evil on him? He begged the gods to judge between them. A letter like this would be inscribed on an earthenware dish with a food offering. After nostalgic recollection of good times together came the grievance or the request for aid. Death, it seems, had not extinguished the deceased, but had only increased the distance between the writer and the addressee.
In the Old Kingdom, the most ancient period of historic Egypt, only the Pharaoh seems to have enjoyed eternal life. But passing centuries brought “the democratization of the hereafter.” Magical pyramid texts on the coffins of nobles helped them become deified into eternal life. In the “Western” regions of the afterlife there was little distinction between pharaohs and nobles. Eventually this opportunity for eternal life reached down the social scale to anyone—even artisans, peasants, and servants—who could afford the necessary ritual and magic. But before then, since servants were the property of their masters, they somehow, through their masters, enjoyed a vicarious immortality.
Naturally enough, to prepare for continuing life, the ancient Egyptians tried to preserve the living form. Techniques for protecting the body from decay improved to provide nobles and commoners as well as pharaohs with the body for an eternal life. Mummification, beginning as a science, increasingly became an art. After removing the brain of the deceased, the intestines were taken out and put in four alabaster vases. The heart, believed to be the seat of the intellect, was separated, wrapped, and reinserted in the body. The empty abdomen was stuffed with linen, sawdust and aromatic spices. Seventy days of soaking in natron (hydrated sodium carbonate) prevented the rest of the body from decaying. The natron-dried body was wrapped in rolls of linen steeped in gum. There were sixteen such layers on the mummy of Tutankhamon. Between the layers they inserted small stone charms, fetishes, and papyrus scraps with magic texts.
Early efforts aimed only to prevent decay. But gradually the priestly embalmers became cosmeticians. They used resinous pastes to flesh out the corpse, inserted artificial eyes, and added metal sheaths to hold fingers in place. Though the body was no longer so skillfully preserved, now it was wrapped in garish painted linen rolls. The deteriorating art of the embalmer after the Twenty-first Dynasty symbolized the decay of ancient Egyptian civilization.
But the mystique of the mummy survived and its medicinal powers became proverbial. In the Middle Ages “mummy,” the powder made (really or reputedly) from ground-up mummies, was a staple of European apothecary shops. “These dead bodies,” the English traveler Hakluyt complained in 1599, “are the Mummie which the Phisitians and Apothecaries doe against our willes make us to swallow.” Originally the world “mummy” did not refer to the dead body, but came from the Arabic mumiyah, meaning bitumen or tar, and was based on the misconception that the black appearance of mummies came from their having been di
pped in pitch.
What the mummy did for the Pharaoh’s body, the pyramid and its surrounding stone temples created for his house. Both showed ancient Egyptian optimism, faith that they could conquer time. How and why their unexcelled techniques for building in stone were so quickly perfected still puzzles historians. Only about a century elapsed between the first notable Egyptian structures of stone and the triumphant masonry of the Great Pyramid. How did they quarry huge blocks of limestone, transport them for miles, then raise, place, and fit them with a jeweler’s precision? All without the aid of a capstan, a pulley, or even a wheeled vehicle!
Modern engineers find mathematics their indispensable tool. Yet the mathematics of the ancient Egyptians, compared with that of other ancient peoples, was crude. Egyptian arithmetic in the Age of the Pyramids was based wholly on a knowledge of the “two times” table and we can wonder whether in the modern sense it should even be called mathematics. Multiplication and division were cast in the form of addition. They multiplied a number by duplicating it the required times, and then added the sums, and their system of division was similar. Oddly enough, this “dyadic” principle would be used again in the twentieth-century computer, but for most of history it was a dead end. Their rudimentary system of “unit-fractions” left them no way of expressing complex fractions.
Still, the Great Pyramid (the Pyramid of Cheops), covering 13.1 acres with six and a quarter million tons of stone, whose casing blocks averaged two and a half tons each, showed a micrometric accuracy of design. The square-ness of its north and south sides had a margin of error of only 0.09 percent, and of the east and west sides only 0.03 percent. The vast dressed-rock pavement on which this enormous mass was resting, when surveyed from opposite corners deviated from a true plane by only 0.004 percent. And there is no evidence that their techniques or designs were borrowed from abroad.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 11
