In later chapters we learn that at Upsala was holden the Thing of all the Swedes. The earth platform on which they met may still be seen. The place was the chief town of all the Swede-realm and one of its monarchs built there a great Hall of the Seven Kings. "The Upsala kings were the master kings in Sweden, whereas there were many county-kings therein, from the time that Odin was lord in Sweden."[95] Again in the _Saga of Olaf the Holy_ we read: "Tenthland (p. 185) is the best and most nobly peopled of Sweden. Thither louteth all the realm. Upsala is there, with the king's-seat, and there is an archbishop's chair, and thereby is named the wealth of Upsala. So call the Swedes the King's-wealth, they call it Upsala-wealth. In each shire is its own Law-Thing, and its own laws in many matters.... But in all matters where the laws sunder, they must all yield to the Upsala-law, and all other lawmen shall be under-men of the lawman who is of Tenthland."[96] Three great howes, each rising some fifty-eight feet above the earthen floor and spreading more than two hundred feet upon it, are seen from far across the well-tilled fenceless flats, over which the wind blows clouds of dust. Many smaller mounds form a rude crescent stretching across the open plain with the great hills in the centre. They are doubtless the last resting-places of many kings about whose "howing" we read in the sagas. Though of old the capital of all the land, Upsala is but a tiny village now, so unimportant that it is known as Gamla (old) Upsala, for the neighbouring city of Östra-aros (East mouth), whose cathedral spires are the most prominent features of the landscape, has usurped the proper name. [Illustration: GAMLA UPSALA] [_Face page 180_ The Kungshögar or Hills of Kings, as the three great tumuli have immemorially been called, are distinguished as those of Odin, Thor and Frey, but these detail names date from much more recent years. They were opened, Odin's in 1846, and Thor's in 1874. They proved to be of the first part of the Later Iron Age, that is the period just before Viking days. Each appears to have been piled up over a cairn of stones covering the ashes of a funeral pyre--which is curious in the light of Snorri Sturluson's express statement:[97] "The first age is called the age of Burning, whereas the wont was to burn all dead men, and raise up standing stones to them; but after that Frey was laid in barrow at Upsala, many great men fell to raising barrows to the memory of their kin, no less often than standing stones."