Chapter 2

I must not speak of the wonderful combination of qualities which were conspicuous in Sir James Simpson, alongside of those which I have mentioned. This may safely be left to the more competent hand of Professor Duns, from whose memoir of his early friend so much may be expected, and where a more general estimate of his character will naturally be found. Yet, in bringing together this series of Sir James Simpson's Archaeological Essays, it seemed not unsuitable for me to express something of my admiration of the earnest truth-seeking spirit with which they were undertaken, as well as of the genius and research with which they were executed.

JOHN STUART.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "The monument reverses the order of paternity of the two individuals, making Wecta the son of Witta, instead of Witta the son of Wecta, in which all the old genealogies agree."--_Athenaeum_, July 5, 1862, p. 17.]

[Footnote 2: "The vowel is far more distinctive of the two names than the difference of _c_ and _t_, letters which were continually interchanged."--_Ibid._ August 2, 1862, p. 149.]

[Footnote 3: _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland_, vol. iv. p. 181.]

[Footnote 4: _The Sculptured Stones of Scotland_, vol. ii. Notices of the Plates, p. 71.]

[Footnote 5: _Archaic Sculpturings of Cups, Circles, etc., upon Stones and Rocks in Scotland, England, and other Countries._ Edin. 1867.]

[Footnote 6: _British Archaic Sculpturings_, p. 126.]

[Footnote 7: _Idem_, p. 20.]

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.

PAGE

I. ARCHAEOLOGY: ITS PAST AND ITS FUTURE WORK 1

An Inaugural Address to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Session 1860-61. Proc. vol. iv. p. 5.

II. ON AN OLD STONE-ROOFED CELL OR ORATORY IN THE ISLAND OF INCHCOLM 67

A Paper read to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, July 13, 1857. Proc. vol. ii. p. 489.

[With Notes by Dr. George Petrie, Author of an Essay on the "Early Ecclesiastical Architecture and Round Towers of Ireland."]

III. ON THE CAT-STANE, KIRKLISTON 137

Read to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 11th February 1861. Proc. vol. iv. p. 119.

Printed separately in 1862, and "Inscribed with Feelings of the most Sincere Esteem to Mrs. Pender, Crumpsall House, Manchester."

IV. ON SOME SCOTTISH MAGICAL CHARM-STONES, OR CURING-STONES 199

Read to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 8th April 1861. Proc. vol. iv. p. 211.

V. IS THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZEH A METROLOGICAL MONUMENT? 219

Corrected Abstract of a Communication to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 20th January 1868, with Notes and an Appendix. Proc. of the Royal Society, No. 75.

ARCHAEOLOGY:

ITS PAST AND ITS FUTURE WORK.[8]

It has become a practice of late years in this Society for one of the Vice-Presidents to read an Annual Address on some topic or topics connected with Archaeology. I appear here to-night more in compliance with this custom than with any hope of being able to state aught to you that is likely to prove either of adequate interest or of adequate importance for such an occasion.

In making this admission, I am fully aware that the deficiency lies in myself, and not in my subject. For truly there are few studies which offer so many tempting fields of observation and comment as Archaeology. Indeed, the aim and the groundwork of the studies of the antiquary form a sufficient guarantee for the interest with which these studies are invested. For the leading object and intent of all his pursuits is--MAN, and man's ways and works, his habits and thoughts, from the earliest dates at which we can find his traces and tracks upon the earth, onward and forwards along the journey of past time. During this long journey, man has everywhere left scattered behind and around him innumerable relics, forming so many permanent impressions and evidences of his march and progress. These impressions and evidences the antiquary searches for and studies--in the changes which have in successive eras taken place (as proved by their existing and discoverable remains) in the materials and forms of the implements and tools which man has from the earliest times used in the chase and in agriculture; in the weapons which he has employed in battle; in the habitations which he has dwelt in during peace, and in the earth-works and stone-works which he has raised during war; in the dresses and ornaments which he has worn; in the varying forms of religious faith which he has held, and the deities that he has worshipped; in the sacred temples and fanes which he has reared; in the various modes in which he has disposed of the dead; in the laws and governments under which he has lived; in the arts which he has cultivated; in the sculptures which he has carved; in the coins and medals which he has struck; in the inscriptions which he has cut; in the records which he has written; and in the character and type of the languages in which he has spoken. All the markings and relics of man, in the dim and distant past, which industry and science can possibly extract from these and from other analogous sources, Archaeology carefully collects, arranges, and generalises, stimulated by the fond hope that through such means she will yet gradually recover more and more of the earlier chronicles and lost annals of the human race, and of the various individual communities and families of that race.

The objects of antiquarian research embrace events and periods, many of which are placed within the era of written evidence; but many more are of a date long anterior to the epoch when man made that greatest of human discoveries--the discovery, namely, of the power of permanently recording words, thoughts, and acts, in symbolical and alphabetic writing. To some minds it has seemed almost chimerical for the archaeologist to expect to regain to any extent a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances of man, and of the different nations of men, before human cunning had learned to collect and inscribe them on stone or brass, or had fashioned them into written or traditional records capable of being safely floated down the stream of time. But the modern history of Archaeology, as well as the analogies of other allied pursuits, are totally against any such hopeless views.

Almost within the lifetime of some who are still amongst us, there has sprung up and been cultivated--and cultivated most successfully too--a science which has no written documents or legible inscriptions to guide it on its path, and whose researches are far more ancient in their object than the researches of Archaeology. Its subject is an antiquity greatly older than human antiquity. It deals with the state of the earth and of the inhabitants of the earth in times immeasurably beyond the earliest times studied by the antiquary. In the course of its investigations it has recovered many strange stories and marvellous chronicles of the world and of its living occupants--long, long ages before human antiquity even began. But if Geology has thus successfully restored to us long and important chapters in the pre-Adamite annals of the world's history, need Archaeology despair of yet deciphering and reading--infinitely more clearly than it has yet done--that far later episode in the drama of the past which opens with the appearance of man as a denizen of earth. The modes of investigating these two allied and almost continuous sciences--Geology and Archaeology--are the same in principle, however much the two sciences themselves may differ in detail. And if Geology, in its efforts to regain the records of the past state of animal and vegetable life upon the surface of the earth, has attractions which bind the votaries of it to its ardent study, surely Archaeology has equal, if not stronger claims to urge in its own behoof and favour. To the human mind the study of those relics by which the archaeologist tries to recover and reconstruct the history of the past races and nations of man, should naturally form as engrossing a topic as the study of those relics by which the geologist tries to regain the history of the past races and families of the _fauna_ and _flora_ of the ancient world. Surely, as a mere matter of scientific pursuit, the ancient or fossil states of man should--for man himself--have attractions as great, at least, as the ancient or fossil states of plants and animals; and the old Celt, or Pict, or Saxon, be as interesting a study as the old Lepidodendron or Ichthyosaurus.

Formerly, the pursuit of Archaeology was not unfrequently regarded as a kind of romantic dilettanteism, as a collecting together of meaningless antique relics and oddities, as a greedy hoarding and storing up of rubbish and frivolities that were fit only for an old curiosity shop, and that were valued merely because they were old;--while the essays and writings of the antiquary were looked down upon as disquisitions upon very profitless conjectures, and very solemn trivialities. Perhaps the objects and method in which antiquarian studies were formerly pursued afforded only too much ground for such accusations. But all this is now, in a great measure, entirely changed. Archaeology, as tempered and directed by the philosophic spirit, and quickened with the life and energy of the nineteenth century, is a very different pursuit from the Archaeology of our forefathers, and has as little relation to their antiquarianism as modern Chemistry and modern Astronomy have to their former prototypes--Alchemy and Astrology. In proof of this, I may confidently appeal to the good work which Archaeology has done, and the great advances which it has struck out in different directions within the last fifty years. Within this brief period it has made discoveries, perhaps in themselves of as momentous and marvellous a character as those of which any other modern science can boast. Let me cite two or three instances in illustration of this remark.

Dating, then, from the commencement of the present century, Archaeology has--amidst its other work--rediscovered, through the interpretation of the Rosetta-stone, the long-lost hieroglyphic language of Egypt, and has thus found a key by which it has begun--but only as yet begun--to unlock the rich treasure-stores of ancient knowledge which have for ages lain concealed among the monuments and records scattered along the valley of the Nile. It has copied, by the aid of the telescope, the trilingual arrow-headed inscriptions written 300 feet high upon the face of the rocks of Behistun; and though the alphabets and the languages in which these long inscriptions were "graven with a pen of iron and lead upon the rocks for ever," had been long dead and unknown, yet, by a kind of philological divination, Archaeology has exorcised and resuscitated both; and from these dumb stones, and from the analogous inscriptions of Van, Elwend, Persepolis, etc., it has evoked official gazettes and royal contemporaneous annals of the deeds and dominions of Darius, Xerxes, and other Persian kings. By a similar almost talismanic power and process, it has forced the engraved cylinders, bricks, and obelisks of the old cities of Chaldea and Babylonia--as those of Wurka, Niffer, Muqueyer, etc.--to repeat over again to this present generation of men the names of the ancient founders of their public buildings, and the wars and exploits of their ancient monarchs. It has searched among the shapeless mounds on the banks of the Tigris, and after removing the shroud of earth and rubbish under which "Nineveh the Great" had there lain entombed for ages, it has brought back once more to light the riches of the architecture and sculptures of the palaces of that renowned city, and shown the advanced knowledge of Assyria--some thirty long centuries ago--in mechanics and engineering, in working and inlaying with metals, in the construction of the optical lens, in the manufactory of pottery and glass, and in most other matters of material civilisation. It has lately, by these and other discoveries in the East, confirmed in many interesting points, and confuted in none, the truth of the Biblical records. It has found, for instance, every city in Palestine and the neighbouring kingdoms whose special and precise doom was pronounced by the sure word of Prophecy, showing the exact state foretold of them twenty or thirty centuries ago,--as Askelon tenantless, the site of ancient Gaza "bald," old Tyre "scraped" up, and Samaria with its foundations exposed, and its "stones poured down in heaps" into the valley below. It has further, within the last few years, stolen into the deserts of the Hauran, through the old vigilant guard formed around that region by the Bedouin Arabs, and there--(as if in startling contradiction to the dead and buried cities of Syria, etc.)--it has--as was equally predicted--discovered the numerous cyclopic cities of Bashan standing perfect and entire, yet "desolate and without any to dwell therein,"--cities wrapped, as it were, in a state of mortal trance, and patiently awaiting the prophesied period of their future revival and rehabitation; some of them of great size, as Um-el-Jemal (probably the Beth-gamul of Scripture), a city covering as large a space as Jerusalem, with its high and massive basaltic town walls, its squares, its public buildings, its paved streets, and its houses with their rooms, stairs, revolving and frequently sculptured stone-doors, all nearly as complete and unbroken, as if its old inhabitants had only deserted it yesterday. Again, from another and more distant part of the East,--from the plains of India,--Archaeology has recently brought to Europe, and at an English press printed for the first time, upwards of 1000 of the sacred hymns of the Rig-Veda, the most ancient literary work of the Aryan or Indo-European race of mankind; for, according to the calm judgment of our ripest Sanskrit scholars, these hymns were composed before Homer sung of the wrath of Achilles; and they are further remarkable, on this account, that they seem to have been transmitted down for upwards of 3000 years by oral tradition alone--the Brahmin priests up to the present day still spending--as Caesar tells us the old Druidical priests of Gaul spent--twelve, twenty, or more years of their lives, in learning by heart these sacred lays and themes, and then teaching them in turn to their pupils and successors.

The notices of antiquarian progress in modern times, that I have hitherto alluded to, refer to other continents than our own. But since the commencement of the present century Archaeology has been equally active in Europe. It has, by its recent devoted study of the whole works of art belonging to Greece, shown that in many respects a livelier and more familiar knowledge of the ancient inhabitants of that classic land is to be derived from the contemplation of their remaining statues, sculptures, gems, medals, coins, etc., than by any amount of mere school-grinding at Greek words and Greek quantities. It has recovered at the same time some interesting objects connected with ancient Grecian history; having, for example, during the occupation of Constantinople in 1854 by the armies of England and France, laid bare to its base and carefully copied the inscription, engraved some twenty-three centuries ago, upon the brazen stand of the famous tripod which was dedicated by the confederate Greeks to Apollo at Delphi, after the defeat of the Persian host at Platea,--an inscription that Herodotus himself speaks of, and by which, indeed, the Father of History seems to have authenticated his own battle-roll of the Greek combatants. Archaeology has busied itself also, particularly of late years, in disinterring the ruins of numerous old Roman villas, towns, and cities in Italy, in France, in Britain, and in the other western colonies of Home; and by this measure it has gained for us a clearer and nearer insight into every-day Roman life and habits, than all the wealth of classic literature supplies us with. Though perfectly acquainted with the Etruscan alphabet, it has hitherto utterly failed to read a single line of the numerous inscriptions found in Etruria, but yet among the unwritten records and relics of the towns and tombs of that ancient kingdom, it has recovered a wonderfully complete knowledge of the manners, and habits, and faith, of a great and prosperous nation, which--located in the central districts of Italy--was already far advanced in civilisation and refinement long before that epoch when Romulus is fabled to have drawn around the Palatine the first boundary line of the infant city which was destined to become the mistress of the world. Latterly, among all the western and northern countries of Europe, in Germany, in Scandinavia, in Denmark, in France, and in the British Islands, Archaeology has made many careful and valuable collections of the numerous and diversified implements, weapons, etc., of the aboriginal inhabitants of these parts, and traced by them the stratifications, as it were, of progress and civilisation, by which our primaeval ancestors successively passed upwards through the varying eras and stages of advancement, from their first struggles in the battle of life with tools of stone, and flint, and bone alone, till they discovered and applied the use of metals in the arts alike of peace and war; from those distant ages in which, dressed in the skins of animals, they wore ornaments made of sea-shells and jet, till the times when they learned to plait and weave dresses of hair, wool, and other fibres, and adorned their chiefs with torcs and armlets of bronze, silver, and gold. Archaeology also has sought out and studied the strongholds and forts, the land and lake habitations of these, our primaeval Celtic and Teutonic forefathers:--and has discovered among their ruins many interesting specimens of the implements they used, the dresses that they wore, the houses they inhabited, and the very food they fed upon. It has descended also into their sepulchres and tombs, and there--among the mysterious contents of their graves and cinerary urns--it has found revealed many other wondrous proofs of their habits and condition during this life, as well as of their creeds and faith in regard to a future state of existence.

By the aid of that new and most powerful ally, Comparative Philology, Archaeology has lately made other great advances. By proofs exactly of the same linguistic kind as those by which the modern Spanish, French, and other Latin dialects can be shown to have all radiated from Rome as their centre, the old traditions of the eastern origin of all the chief nations of Europe have been proved to be fundamentally true; for by evidence so "irrefragable" (to use the expression of the Taylorian professor of modern languages at Oxford), that "not an English jury could now-a-days reject it," Philological Archaeology has shown that of the three great families of mankind--the Semitic, the Turanian, and the Aryan--this last, the Aryan, Japhetic, or Indo-European race, had its chief home about the centre of Western Asia;--that betimes there issued thence from its paternal hearths, and wended their way southward, human swarms that formed the nations of Persia and Hindustan;--that at distant and different, and in some cases earlier periods, there hived off from the same parental stock other waves of population, which wandered westward, and formed successively the European nations of the Celts, the Teutons, the Italians, the Greeks, and the Sclaves;--and that while each exodus of this western emigration, which followed in the wake of its fellow, drove its earliest predecessor before it in a general direction further and further towards the setting sun, at the same time some aboriginal, and probably Turanian races, which previously inhabited portions of Europe, were gradually pushed and pressed aside and upwards, by the more powerful and encroaching Aryans, into districts either so sterile or so mountainous and strong, that it was too worthless or too difficult to follow them further--their remnants being represented at the present day by the Laps, the Basques, and the Esths. Philological Archaeology has further demonstrated that the vast populations which now stretch from the mouth of the Ganges to the Pentland Firth,--sprung, as they are, with a few exceptions only, from the same primitive Aryan stock,--all use words which, though phonetically changed, are radically identical for many matters, as for the nearest relationships of family life, for the naming of domestic animals, and other common objects. Some of these archaic words indicate, by their hoary antiquity, the original pastoral employment and character of those that formed the parental stock in our old original Asiatic home; the special term, for example (the "pasu" of the old Sanskrit or Zend), which signified "private" property among the Aryans, and which we now use under the English modifications, "peculiar" and "pecuniary"--primarily meaning "flocks;"[9] the Sanskrit word for Protector, and ultimately for the king himself, "go-pa," being the old word for cowherd, and consecutively for chief herdsman; while the endearing name of "daughter" (the duhitar of the Sanskrit, the [Greek: thygater] of the Greek), as applied in the leading Indo-European languages to the female children of our households, is derived from a verb which shows the original signification of the appellation to have been the "milker" of the cows. At the same time the most ancient mythologies and superstitions, and apparently even the legends and traditions of the various and diversified Indo-European races, appear also, the more they are examined, to betray more and more of a common parentage. Briefly, and in truth, then, Philological Archaeology proves that the Saxon and the Persian, the Scandinavian and the Greek, the Icelander and the Italian, the fair-skinned Scottish Highlander, and his late foe, the swarthy Bengalee, are all distant, very distant, cousins, whose ancestors were brothers that parted company with each other long, long ages ago, on the plains of Iran. That the ancestors of these different races originally lived together on these Asiatic plains "within the same fences, and separate from the ancestors of the Semitic and Turanian races," is (to quote the words of Max Mueller), "a fact as firmly established as that the Normans of William the Conqueror were the Northmen of Scandinavia."