The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18): A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times to the PresentVarious
History
The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18): A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times to the Present
Various
World history
That the men of the later Stone Age had developed a considerable
degree of culture is proved by such remains as these. The erection
of these giant chambers must have called for a vast amount of
co-operation, skill, and ingenuity. The means whereby the massive
stones were placed into position, and so fixed to withstand the
shocks of thousands of years, have not yet been satisfactorily
explained by archæology.
]
The stone blocks of which these gigantic structures are piled now
often lie bare. Large stones placed crosswise, which represent, as
it were, the side-walls of a room, support a roof of one or several
“covering-stones” of occasionally colossal size. For the erection of
these in their present position without the technical resources at the
disposal of modern builders, human strength appears inadequate; in
popular opinion only giants could have made such structures. Some of
the stones are really so large, and the covering-stones especially so
enormous, that these buildings have defied destruction, for thousands
of years, by their very weight.
In the time of their construction these giants’ graves were mostly
buried under mounds. They were the inner structures of large tumuli,
in which the reverence of the men of the Stone Age once buried its
heroes. One of the finest “giant’s chambers” is probably that near Öm,
in the neighbourhood of Roskilde, in Denmark. The building material
consists merely of erratic stone blocks of enormous size. The rough
blocks were mostly set up by the side of one another, without any
further working, so as to support one another as far as possible; at
the same time all of them, as Sophus Müller observes, are slightly
inclined inward, so that they are kept more firmly in position by their
own weight. The stones thus erected, forming the parallel side-walls
of the whole structure, stand so far apart that a huge erratic block,
reaching from one wall to the other, could be placed on them as a roof.
The distance between the side-walls of the giant’s chambers attains
a maximum of eight to nine feet; the covering-stones placed on them
are some ten to eleven feet long. The pressure of the covering-stones
from above helps considerably to hold the whole structure together.
In order to distribute the pressure of the covering-stones regularly,
smaller stones were carefully inserted under the wall-stones where they
had to stand on the ground. How exactly these proportions of weight
were judged is proved by the fact that these structures of heavy and
irregular stones, resting on their natural, differently shaped sides
and edges, have held together until the present day. The inner walls
of the chambers were made as carefully as possible. Where, as on the
outside, the rough and irregular form of the stone block projects,
either the naturally smooth side was turned inward or the roughness was
chipped off.
[Illustration: THE MARVELLOUS MEMORIALS OF THE STONE AGE AT CARNAC IN
BRITTANY
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