However probable it may be that the Phoenicians carried on a direct trade with the south western portion of Britain, it is not an established historical fact that that they did so,' and any such intercourse would probably have been confined to the sea-coast. If any Phoenician influences reached the interior of Britain it would probably have been through the Veneti, who inhabited Armorican Gaul, the district in which Karnac is found, and who, in the time of Cæsar, were carrying on a brisk trade with the British. Aylett Sammes (inadvertently omitted at page 40), appears to have been the first who broached the opinion that the Phoenicians were connected with Stonehenge. In vol. i., of his "Britannia Antiqua Illustrata," 1676, p. 395, is a treatise of the ancient monument called Stonehenge. It is very prosy, and the gist of it is, that he and to the Druids; under the sanction of whose names we shelter ourselves, whenever we are ignorant and bewildered. But they were the operations of a very remote age; probably before the time when the Druids or Celta were first known. I question, whether there be in the world a monument, which is much prior to the celebrated Stone-Henge. There is reason to think that it was erected by a foreign colony; one of the first which came into the island. Here is extant at this day, one of those rocking stones, of which I have been speaking above. [?] The ancients distinguished stones erected with a religious view by the name of amber; by which was signified anything solar and divine. The Grecians called them Пerpai Aμßpoσiai,' Petræ Ambrosiæ; and there are representations of such upon coins. Stonehenge is composed of these amber-stones; hence the next town is denominated "Ambrosbury:" not from a Roman Ambrosius; for no such person existed; but from the Ambrosia Petræ, in whose vicinity it stands." · 1 Mr. C. T. Newton, of the British Museum, concluded a lecture on Phoenician Art in Britain, given at the Annual Meeting of the Archæological Institute, at Dorchester, in 1865, "by reverting to the question whether the Phoenicians had ever landed on the coast of Britain. This question it will be better to consider still in abeyance. What is wanted for its ultimate solution is a diligent notation of facts. The examination of barrows in the southern counties should be carried on with the most minute care, and the names of places along the coast should be analyzed by the tests of modern philology; for, if the Phoenicians frequented any portion of the British Coast, it is probable that they would have given names to the more important harbours and promontories, as they did in Africa and Spain."-Builder, August 26th, 1865. 2 Aylett Sammes was of Christ's College, Cambridge, and of the Inner Temple. Wood in his "Athenæ Oxonienses" states that the real author of the work was Robert Aylett, L.L.D., a master in chancery, who was Sammes' uncle, and left him his papers. considers that the Phoenicians were the giants of the "Chorea Gigantum," and that the art of erecting these stones, instead of the stones themselves, was brought from the farthermost parts of Africa, the known habitations of the Phoenicians. Sir William Betham (in the "Gael and Cymbri," 8vo., Dublin, 1834) has advocated the same opinion, but he considered that the Phoenicians were preceded in the occupation of both Britain and Ireland by the Caledonians, afterwards called the Picts, whom he conceives to have been a people of Scandinavian origin, the Cimbri of antiquity. The Phoenicians he considered to be the same people with the Gael or Celts. Of the Belgæ, and their probable connection with Stonehenge, the writer will speak presently. Some have supposed that Stonehenge was constructed by the Romans during their occupation of Britain. But the Romans preferred the plains and valleys for their villas and temples to the hilltops and cold downs. It is perfectly true that there was a continuous Roman occupation of the Mendip Hills, as evidenced by the remains of their amphitheatre, and by the considerable number of coins, fibulæ, incised stones, etc., which are constantly being found, especially at Charterhouse; but to such utilitarians as the Romans, it was a matter of importance to occupy these heights, in order that they might derive the full advantage accruing to them from the smelting of lead, and other metals, by the native and subject population. But neither was Salisbury Plain the site which Romans would have selected for the erection of a temple, nor was the style of Stonehenge that which would be adopted by a Roman architect. In Gaul they built such temples as those at Nimes; in the west of Britain they built to Sul Minerva such a temple as that of which the remains may still be seen at Bath. Moreover, the Romans were wont to make their stones "vocal," as Bolton quaintly puts it, "by inscriptions," or by sculpture. Much stress is often laid upon the silence of Roman writers respecting the megalithic structures of Britain, and Mr. Herbert and others argue from this that they must therefore be of post-Roman date; 1 "Humboldt confirras a statement I have often made, that we dare not draw too much from the silence of an author. He refers to three weighty and quite undeniable facts, to which there is no testimony in the very places where we but the Caledonian Wall of the Romans has received but scanty mention from their own historians; and the megalithic works in Gaul are passed over by them in silence as complete as those in our own island. To the writer, the best reason for the absence of any notice of Stonehenge by the Romans, is this; that to any educated Roman who was familiar with the grand and magnificent works of Rome and the neighbourhood, under the late Republic and early Empire, such a work would appear to be rude in form, puny in effect, and scarcely worthy of any special notice. To Mr. Herbert, however, the rudeness and uncouthness of the Stonehenge structure would cause it to have an especial claim upon the attention of the Romans ; "Nothing could be more new and admirable to the eyes of a Greek or Roman than the sight of structures, so rude and uncouth, and yet so stupendous." 1 Mr. Herbert's theory, as propounded in his "Cyclops Christianus" (1849), is that on the lapse of the Britons into a kind of heathenism after the Romans had left Britain, "groves of upright stones were substituted by them for the oak-groves of obsolete Druidism (as Carnac was a grove of the Armorican Britons after Christianity and the rows of stones their walks of sacred groves); that when Britain became free from Roman rule, Ambresbury appears to have been the place to which the national councils were summoned by the king, where the independence of the island was celebrated by joyous festivities, and where the rites and orgies of its fanatics were solemnized. There kings were elected, anointed, and crowned; and there also buried." But it may be asked whether the Romano-British, after the departure of the Romans, had ever a period of sufficient should most certainly expect it. In the Archives of Barcelona there is no trace of the triumphant entrance received by Columbus there. In Marco Polo there is no mention of the Chinese wall. And in the Archives of Portugal there is nothing about the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci in the service of that crown." Dr. Luthardt's "St. John the author of the Fourth Gospel," 1875. 1 Mr. Rickman, in "Archæologia," vol. xxviii, p. 411, considered that Abury was constructed "not earlier than the third century of the Christian æra, and that the more difficult operations requisite for the formation of Stonehenge may be assigned to the next century, or, (to speak with due caution) that this temple was completed before the final departure of the Romans from Britain." VOL. XVI.-NO. XLVI. H peace and quietness in which to build Stonehenge. Even before the Romans left, the Saxons were ravaging the coasts of Britain. There is reason to believe that, during this period, Britain was torn with civil quarrels, "while its Pictish enemies strengthened themselves by a league with marauders from Ireland (Scots, as they were then called), whose pirate boats were harrying the western coast of the island, and with a yet more formidable race of pirates who had long been pillaging along the English Channel. These were the English."1 Under any circumstances, as Dr. Thurnam says, it was scarcely conceivable that the Romanised Britons would have erected these rude masses of stone, when they had such examples before them of architectural skill and beauty as existed at Bath and other Roman cities in this country; or, as Dr. Guest puts it, "I would ask the archæological reader whether he thinks it comes within the limits of a reasonable probability that men who had for centuries been familiarized with the forms of Roman architecture, could have built Stonehenge?"? Had Stonehenge owed its erection to any event connected with the Saxons, we should doubtless have had some mention of it. Dr. Guest 3 says, "It has always appeared to the writer most unreasonable to doubt, that from their first arrival in the island, our ancestors had some mode of registering the events of their history. From these rude memorials were probably formed more perfect registers, which gradually swelled into the chronicles we now possess. The oldest extant copy of the Saxon Chronicle was written shortly before the year 900, or at the close of Alfred's reign; but we know that some of its entries were copied, almost verbatim, from chronicles which must have been in existence before the time of Bede, and there are others which may have been written at a time when Hengest and Ambrosius were yet rivals." The Saxons would probably have left some record of their connection with Stonehenge if they had constructed it, or if any event 1 Green's "History of the English People," p. 6. 2 Archæological Journal," 1851, p. 155. "On the Early English Settlements in South Britain."-Salisbury Volume of Arch. Institute, p. 46. with which they had been associated had led to its construction. Not to press, however, too far, the absence of written records, we may fairly say, that even if their political position had been favourable to such undertakings, the Saxons would hardly have built a stone temple in the centre of a British necropolis; and that if they had done so,it would have been, to a certain extent, surrounded by Saxon graves, as well as by British; but no traces of Saxon interment are here to be found. It has been urged, too, that they would never have called it by the ignominious name of "Stone Gallows," if they had themselves erected it.' Of the Danes, as the architects of Stonehenge, it will be enough to say, with Warton,' that, "during their temporary visits and unmatured establishment, they had not leisure or opportunities for such laborious and lasting structures, however suitable to their rude conceptions," or, with Mr. Herbert, that "the advocates of the Danes, as the builders of Stonehenge, ascribe to a transitory irruption the performance of some settled government." 3 And here it may be as well to notice the opinions of those, who having made Indian Antiquities their study, have come to the 1 Stukeley, p. 7, reprint. 2 History of Kiddington, p. 70. 4 Mr. Max Müller, writing about the great resemblance of Indian cromlechs, cairns and kistaevns, to those of Cornwall, Ireland, and Scotland, and the frequency with which Indian officers speak of them as if they were Celtic or Druidical, says: "All these monuments in the South of India are no doubt extremely interesting, but to call them Celtic, Druidical, or Sythic, is unscientific, or, at all events, exceedingly premature. There is in all architectural monuments a natural or rational, and a conventional, or it may be, irrational element. A striking agreement in purely conventional features may justify the assumption that monuments so far distant from each other as the cromlechs of Anglesea and the Mori-Munni' of Shorapoor owe their origin to the same architects, or to the same races. But an agreement in purely natural contrivances goes for nothing, or, at least, for very little. Now there is very little that can be called conventional in a mere stone pillar, or in a cairn, that is, an artificial heap of stones. Even the erection of a cromlech can hardly be claimed as a separate style of architecture. Children, all over the world, if building houses with cards, will build cromlechs; and people, all over the world, if the neighbourhood supplies large slabs of stone, will put three stones together to keep out the sun or wind, and put a fourth stone on the top to keep out the rain. Before monuments like those described by Captain Meadows |