Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric PeoplesNadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de
History
Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples
Nadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de
Archaeology; Prehistoric peoples
Although the proofs of there having been a Stone age in Western Europe
are absolutely convincing, it is difficult to feel equally sure with
regard to the portions of the globe where so many districts are closed
to the explorer. Everywhere, however, where excavations have been made,
they have yielded the most remarkable results. M. de Ujfalvy has
brought diorite and serpentine hatchets and wedges from the south of
Siberia, and Count Ouvaroff tells us of a Quaternary deposit, the only
one known at present at Irkutsk, in Eastern Siberia, containing cut
flints. Near Tobolsk, Poliaskoff found some beautifully worked stones.
Other archæologists tell us of having found, in the east of the Ural
Mountains and on the shores of the Joswa, hammers, hatchets, pestles,
nuclei the shape of polygonal prisms, and round or long pieces of
flint, all pierced with a central hole, which are supposed to have been
spindle whorls. Lastly, Klementz tells us that the lofty valleys of the
Yenesei and its tributaries were inhabited in the most remote times by
races who developed a special civilization.
At the other extremity of the great Asiatic continent, a deposit of
cinders found at the entrance of a cave near the Nahr el Kelb yielded
some flint knives or scrapers, and more recently a prehistoric station
has been made out at Hanoweh, a little village of Lebanon, east of
Tyre. The flints are of primitive shapes, not unlike the most ancient
forms found in France. They were discovered in a mass of _débris_ of
all kinds, forming a very hard conglomerate. Some teeth, which had
belonged to animals of the bovidæ, cervidæ, and equidæ groups, were got
out with considerable difficulty, but the bones in the conglomerate
were too touch broken up to be identified. Worked flints and arrow- or
spear-heads were also found in considerable quantities in various parts
of the table-land of Sinai, and at the openings of the caves in which
the ancient inhabitants took refuge. It was with stone tools that these
people worked the mines riddling the sides of the mountains, and it is
still easy to make out traces of their operations.
We have already alluded to Japan; for a long time the barbarian Aïnos,
the earliest inhabitants of the country, were acquainted with nothing
but stone. Flint arrows were presented to the Emperor Wu-Wang eleven
hundred years before our era; the annals of one of the ancient
dynasties speak of flint weapons, and an encyclopædia published in the
reign of the Emperor Kang-Hi speaks of rock hatchets, some black and
some green, and all alike dating from the most remote antiquity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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