'Foday the most familiar forms of expression are the written and spoken word, both of whieh are vital to our civilisation. Music and art are more subtle forms of expression, but still of vital importance to the well-being of mankind. Indeed, we could all well do without a large proportion of the words which deluge us daily, but our civilisation would be impoverished if we lacked the best of music and art. In prehistoric times there was, so far as is known, no written word, and the spoken word may have been confined to intimate person-to-person communication. Music there may have been; art there definitely was. The prehistoric rock carvings which have survived in some of the Neolithic passage tombs, in Ireland especially, are rich and beautiful, skilfully executed and still able to evoke admiration today. The best examples are found at Newgrange, Knowth, h'ourknocks and Loughcrew, two of these sites being featured in ‘Places to Visit’.
W’hether the great variety of designs used were simply chosen for their aesthetic qualities or also possessed religious and spiritual significance is difficult to assess, though Martin Brennan, who has meticulously studied the most elaborate of the carvings in the Boyne Valley, sees them as Stone Age sundials (to much simplify his detailed work), used by the scientists of the day to study the solstices, equinoxes and movements of the moon. Such a suggestion is no longer as outrageous as it would once have been: recent research into the sky lore of the original peoples in all parts of the American continent has shown beyond question that they w'ere advanced watchers of the sky, and had constructed all manner of devices to help them observe and plot the celestial movements. In many details these devices bear very close resemblance to the carvings of the New Stone Age in Ireland. For example, spirals are often seen in the Irish tomb art, and at Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, two spirals were found carved on a rock. At noon at the summer solstice a researcher saw a sliver of sunlight shine between slabs
Decorated lintel-stone inside Fourknocks passage-tomb (Co. Meath). Martin Brennan sees this as a ‘Neolithic scienti fic instrument for charting the sun’s movements'.
Of stone standing against the rockface and move vertically through one of the spirals. She was able to show that this was not a coincidence, for at the equinoxes a dagger of light crossed the other, smaller, spiral. It is very likely that some at least of the prehistoric carvings in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe had a similar astronomical function.
Apart from the tomb art, there are many other prehistoric rock carvings which are difficult to interpret but some of which may have had an astronomical function. Cup and ring marks predominate, and these could be sun symbols, d'hey are carved on slabs of rock in the open air, and possibly date from the Bronze Age. One interpretation is that they are magical symbols carved in an attempt to bring back the sun at a time of cloudier weather and a generally deteriorating climate. Other symbols are also seen - cup marks w'ithout rings, concentric rings, crosses, lines crisscrossed and meandering, etc. These petroglyphs (i. e. rock carvings) are found throughout Ireland and in Britain, especially in the Isle of Man, Northumberland, the Yorkshires, Galloway and Argyll.
The explanations for the carvings are almost as numerous as the carvings themselves - Ronald W. B. Morris lists 104 explanations in one of his books, and a number of them could be valid: alignment markers, marks made by early copper and gold prospectors, magical symbols (representations of parts of the
Mother goddess’s body, fertility symbols, etc.), water diviners’ symbols, mixing vessels (for casting bronze, mixing colours, etc.), measures, cups for Druidical blood sacrifices, early clocks, written messages, maps of the countryside or the stars, doodles, boundary markers, route markers, gaming tables, memorials to the dead, weathering of natural rock strata, oath or victory marks, knife-sharf)emng marks, and so it goes on. The carvings are certainly intriguing, and a lifetime of study could be devoted to them, but at present we lean to the belief that some of them, particularly the cup and ring marks, had an astronomical function, possibly as magical symbols intended to bring back the often-absent sun. If the weather was deteriorating, as seems to have happened in the late Bronze.-gc beginning around 1000 BC and continuing over several hundred years, this would have had dramatic consequences both for agriculture and astronomical observations which relied on clear skies, and the people’s temporal and spiritual practices and beliefs would have been thrown into chaos.
'Fhe people of later ages continued to carve strange symbols on to rocks and stones, and in two important cases these have been shown to be genuine scripts, and have been deciphered. One of them is ealled Ogham, a very strange script thought to have originated in Ireland and based on the Latin alphabet. Straight or slanted lines were used in different combinations to represent letters, their positioning along a straight-edge, usually the edge of a stone, also being very important. For example, the vowels are formed of one, two, three, four or five short lines across the edge; Q is four lines to the left of the edge, N is four lines to the right, and so on - see the photograph of Lewannick Ogham stone in ‘Places to Visit’ for an illustration of how Ogham looks in use. Fhe name Ogham (or Ogam) comes from Oiginiu, who was the smith-god and the god of writing, and it was often used for memorial inscriptions on stones in the late Iron. Age. It was in use from AD 300 to the end of the seventh century, and over 300 stones with Ogham inscriptions are now known, in \ ales, Cornwall and Scotland as well as Ireland.
Fqually strange are runes. 'Fhe runic script was brought over to Britain from Scandinavia in Saxon times, and was actively used between the fifth and eleventh centuries AD. It was used on monuments including crosses, gravestones, coins, and on any object that bore decorative carving. .As might be expected with a script of Scandinavian origin, monuments and objects with runes are to be found largely in the north and east of England, with also a few examples in south-west Scotland. The symbols used are difficult to describe, but an idea of their appearance can be gained by studying the accompanying illustration.
The.orse god Woden was, according to myth, the discoverer of runes and so they were a magical alphabet not used for everyday communications. I’hey could be engraved on to personal objects such as rings and swords, and carved on to stones and caskets. The rune master was the wise man who was skilled in the use of these hieroglyphs and only he would know the correct characters to use to give protection and power to both the object and its owner. With the coming of Christianity the use of runes was adopted by the monks and runic and Latin scripts were used together on monuments and coins. The Ruthwell cross (Dumfries & Galloway) is a good example of this blending of the pagan and Christian practices, part of the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘Dream of the Rood’ being carved in runes on one side of the cross.
Runes are carved dmvn the edges of the east and tvest faces of the Ruthuell Cross.
Some of the most beautiful and fascinating forms of ancient rock art are known as‘Pictish symbol stones’, which are unique to Scotland. 'I'he Piets were a group of tribes living in northeast Scotland c. AD 300-850. The earliest of their ‘symbol stones’ were standing stones incised with the emblems which make them uniquely Pictish - such things as mirrors, combs, snakes or serpents, animals, birds, fishes and geometrical shapes, all rendered in a firm yet delicate outline of great beauty and precision. The meaning of these symbols is uncertain, but mirrors and combs suggest women, and some of the stones are thought to have been tombstones. After AD 700 the stones became more elaborate. Instead of being unworked blocks of stone incised with a few designs, they took the shapes of Christian cross-slabs and the designs were carved in relief, the usual Pictish designs now being accompanied by Christian symbols and interlace ornament (see the Aberlemno churchyard stone in ‘Places to Visit’). These later stones illustrate the spread of Roman Christianity into previously Celtic areas. The best examples are works of art to rival the Celtic crosses we shall see in the next chapter.
Even though the Pictish symbol stones are so much nearer to our own time than the earliest rock art we have described, only 1,200 years ago as against 5,500 years ago, they are equally mystifying. We can recognise some of the symbols, but why they should be carved on stones in this way is not known. Many of the symbols are still unidentifiable. One animal, described as an elephant-like creature, may in fact be a representation of water monsters which were seen in those days, and may still be seen, in the Scottish lakes. The best known of these creatures today is the Loch. Ness Monster, which some people believe still inhabits the large lake near Inverness (see Chapter 20, where there is a photograph of the monster). The Pictish animal has a ‘proboscis’ projecting from its head which could be the appendage looking like an elephant’s trunk which some witnesses of water monsters have reported seeing, and other features of the Pictish creature bear a close resemblance to features of Nessie and her cousins as reported by modern witnesses. Since a whole range of animals and birds is accurately depicted on the symbol stones - wolf, bull, cow, stag, horse, eagle, goose - perhaps these were the creatures most familiar to the Piets in their everyday world, and ‘monsters’ were also familiar to them, being more often seen in the lakes than they are today, and accepted as part of the natural world just like eagles and stags. Unlike todav, when the monster’s verv existence is hotlv debated!
World History
