they constructed temples. Göbekli Tepe suggests that man made places of worship predate the first villages.
In Skara Brae, a later Neolithic community (around 3000 BC) in the northerly Orkney Islands of Scotland, the homes included a fireplace, stone tanks (possibly used for storing live fish, because they were a seafaring folk), and built-in stone furniture (beds, chairs, tables, and shelves). The only art we have from Skara Brae are the simple designs carved into the stone pottery and some of the stone beds.
Cracking the mystery of the megaliths and menhirs
The most startling examples of New Stone Age architecture are the mysterious megaliths of Brittany and England.
Describing a megalith
A megalithic structure is a simple or complex arrangement of stones standing upright like dominoes. Some appear to be stark, open-air temples built by mammoth-sized men. Others look like graveyards with hundreds of headstones sprouting out of the earth. Types of megalith construction include
Post-and-lintel systems: In this arrangement, the post part is made up of the upright stones, and the lintel is the horizontal slab on top. Some megalith structures did serve as tombs, either for one person or several people. Many megalithic tombs look like giant stone tables with two uprights supporting a massive horizontal slab laid across them. The post-and-lintel system is one of humankind’s first architectural advances. Sometimes the tombs are covered with small rocks and dirt, forming a grave mound over the horizontal.
Menhirs: Topless megaliths — solitary upright slabs — appear in two types of formations: circular patterns known as cromlechs and cemetery-like rows called alignments. Prehistoric peoples scattered fields of menhirs throughout Brittany in western France between 4250 BC and 3750 BC. Despite their appearance, alignments weren’t graveyards. They seem to have been astronomical observatories and sites for sun worship (not the kind that requires an SPF 15). The largest alignment is in Carnac, Brittany, where 3,000 menhirs stand in 2-mile-long rows. The menhirs appear to gradually grow as you move from east to west. Stones on the eastern side are 3 feet high, while on the western end they’re over 13 feet high. The alignment corresponds to the rising and setting sun. Today, no one knows how this prehistoric observatory worked.
Singling out Stonehenge
The greatest megalithic structure is the circle of stone slabs known as Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in England. Stonehenge was erected between 2550 BC and 1600 BC in at least four stages. It was once believed to be a Druid (Celtic priest) temple. We now think that this elaborate network of stones was used to predict solstices and eclipses, vital knowledge for people dependent on the growing season.
From a distance, Stonehenge looks like an unfinished dominoes game played by giants. On closer inspection, it consists of a series of concentric circles and circular shapes:
An inner horseshoe of five sets of gray sandstone is grouped in a post-and-lintel arrangement.
An outer circle of 20-foot-high gray sandstones, called sarsen stones, is topped by lintels. Each sarsen stone weighs up to 50 tons. The lintels are connected, forming a continuous circle.
A roughly 1,000-foot trench and embankment encircle the megaliths. This arrangement of circles within circles still baffles people today.
Until 1500 BC, a circle of bluestones stood between the sarsen stones and the horseshoe. The only available bluestone comes from Wales, 150 miles away. Stonehenge builders believed that bluestone possessed special properties, probably magical ones — otherwise, they wouldn’t have hauled them such a long distance. In 1500 BC, the last generation of Stonehenge builders moved the bluestones inside the horseshoe; researchers today have no idea why.
Prehistoric builders also smoothed the inside faces of the stone posts and lintels and tapered the posts at the top so that the bellies or midsections of the posts appear to bulge. Even more impressive, they “drilled” holes in the lintels and cut cone-shaped pegs into the posts so that the posts and lintels would fit together snuggly in a mortise and tenon joint like Lincoln Logs. The designers also curved the outer lintels so each would form an arc, enhancing the circular appearance of the outer ring.
So what’s the purpose of this network of stones? Was it a temple, a place of human sacrifice, or a stone calendar? The function of Stonehenge is still a mystery, but recent investigations show that it could have been used to accurately predict the phases of the moon, solstices, and eclipses.
Chapter 5
Fickle Gods, Warrior Art, and the Birth of Writing: Mesopotamian Art
IN THIS CHAPTER
And Terah took Abram his son … and they went forth … from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan [modern Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel]… .
—GENESIS 11:31
Mesopotamia, which means “between rivers” in Greek, is bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which fertilize it throughout the year. For this reason, it is also known as the Fertile Crescent. Note: Some archeologists believe that this fertile belt of land, where fruits and grains once flourished in natural abundance, was the biblical Garden of Eden.
Sumer — a cluster of city-states in Mesopotamia — was a land of firsts. The Sumerian patriarch Abraham (see the sidebar “Civilized lords or black-headed people?”) founded monotheism (belief in one god), and the Sumerians invented writing. They also created the first epic poem, Gilgamesh, and the earliest codes of laws, the most famous being the Code of Hammurabi. Archeologists even found the oldest wheel in Sumer — it’s about 5,500 years old! The Sumerians seem to have made the first potter’s wheel, too. What a creative bunch.
CIVILIZED
