38

BORINGS IN EGYPT IN 1851-1858.

CHAF. III.

assume six inches in a century, the burnt brick met with at a depth of sixty feet would be 12,000 years old.

Another fragment of red brick was found by Linant Bey, in a boring seventy-two feet deep, being two or three feet below the level of the Mediterranean, in the parallel of the apex of the delta, 200 metres distant from the river, on the Libyan side of the Rosetta branch. M. Rosière, in the great French work on Egypt, has estimated the mean rate of deposit of sediment in the delta at two inches and three lines in a centuryf; were we to take two and a half inches, a work of art seventy-two feet deep must have been buried more than 30,000 years ago. But if the boring of Linant Bey was made where an arm of the river had been silted up at a time when the apex of the delta was somewhat farther south, or more distant from the sea than now, the brick in question might be comparatively very modern.

The experiments instituted by Mr. Horner, in the hope of obtaining an accurate chronometric scale for testing the age of a given thickness of Nile sediment, are not considered by experienced Egyptologists to have been satisfactory. The point sought to be determined was the exact amount of Nile mud which had accumulated in 3000 or more years, since the time when certain ancient monuments, such as the obelisk at Heliopolis, or the statue of king Rameses at Memphis, are supposed by some antiquaries to have been erected. Could we have obtained possession of such a measure, the rate of deposition might be judged of, approximately at least, whenever similar mud was observed in other places, or below the foundations of those same monuments. But the ancient Egyptians are known to have been in the habit of enclosing with embankments, the areas on which they erected temples, statues, and obelisks, so as to

* Horner, Philosophical Transactions, 1858.

† Description de l'Egypte (Histoire Naturelle, tom. ii. p. 494).

CHAP. III. ANCIENT MOUNDS OF VALLEY OF THE OHIO.

39

exclude the waters of the Nile; and the point of time to be ascertained, in every case where we find a monument buried to a certain depth in mud, as at Memphis and Heliopolis, is the era when the city fell into such decay that the ancient embankments were neglected, and the river allowed to inundate the site of the temple, obelisk, or statue.

Even if we knew the date of the abandonment of such embankments, the enclosed areas would not afford a favourable opportunity for ascertaining the average rate of deposit in the alluvial plain; for Herodotus tells us that in his time those spots from which the Nile waters had been shut out for centuries appeared sunk, and could be looked down into from the surrounding grounds, which had been raised by the gradual accumulation over them of sediment annually thrown down. If the waters at length should break into such depressions, they must at first carry with them into the enclosure much mud washed from the steep surrounding banks, so that a greater quantity would be deposited in a few years than perhaps in as many centuries on the great plain outside the depressed area, where no such disturbing causes intervened.

Ancient Mounds of the Valley of the Ohio.

As I have already given several European examples of monuments of pre-historic date belonging to the recent period, I will now turn to the American continent. Before the scientific investigation by Messrs. Squier and Davis of the 'Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley,'* no one suspected that the plains of that river had been occupied, for ages before the French and British colonists settled there, by a nation of older date, and more advanced in the arts than the Red Indians whom the Europeans found there. There are hundreds of large mounds in the basin of the Mississippi,

* Smithsonian Contributions, vol. i., 1847.

40

ANTIQUITY OF THE OHIO MOUNDS.

CHAP. III.

and especially in the valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries, which have served, some of them for temples, others for outlook or defence, and others for sepulture. The unknown people by whom they were constructed, judging by the form of several skulls dug out of the burial-places, were of the Mexican or Toltecan race. Some of the earthworks are on so grand a scale as to embrace areas of fifty or a hundred acres within a simple enclosure, and the solid contents of one mound are estimated at twenty millions of cubic feet, so that four of them would be more than equal in bulk to the Great Pyramid of Egypt, which comprises seventy-five millions. From several of these repositories pottery and ornamental sculpture have been taken, and various articles in silver and copper, also stone weapons, some composed of hornstone unpolished, and much resembling in shape some ancient flint implements found near Amiens and other places in Europe, to be alluded to in the sequel.

It is clear that the Ohio mound-builders had commercial intercourse with the natives of distant regions, for among the buried articles some are made of native copper from Lake Superior, and there are also found mica from the Alleghanies, sea-shells from the Gulf of Mexico, and obsidian from the Mexican mountains.

The extraordinary number of the mounds implies a long period, during which a settled agricultural population had made considerable progress in civilization, so as to require large temples for their religious rites, and extensive fortifications to protect them from their enemies. The mounds were almost all confined to fertile valleys or alluvial plains, and some at least are so ancient, that rivers have had time since their construction to encroach on the lower terraces which support them, and again to recede for the distance of nearly a mile, after having undermined and destroyed a part of the works. When the first European settlers entered the valley of the

CHAP. III.

ANTIQUITY OF THE OHIO MOUNDS.

41

Ohio, they found the whole region covered with an uninterrupted forest, and tenanted by the Red Indian hunter, who roamed over it without any fixed abode, or any traditionary connection with his more civilized predecessors. The only positive data as yet obtained for calculating the minimum of time which must have elapsed since the mounds were abandoned, has been derived from the age and nature of the trees found growing on some of these earthworks. When I visited Marietta in 1842, Dr. Hildreth took me to one of the mounds, and showed me where he had seen a tree growing on it, the trunk of which when cut down displayed eight hundred rings of annual growth.* But the late General Harrison, President in 1841 of the United States, who was well skilled in woodcraft, has remarked, in a memoir on this subject, that several generations of trees must have lived and died before the mounds could have been overspread with that variety of species which they supported when the white man first beheld them, for the number and kinds of trees were precisely the same as those which distinguished the surrounding forest. We may be sure,' observed Harrison, 'that no trees were allowed to grow so long as the earthworks were in use; and when they were forsaken, the ground, like all newly cleared land in Ohio, would for a time be monopolised by one or two species of tree, such as the yellow locust and the black or white walnut. When the individuals which were the first to get possession of the ground had died out one after the other, they would in many cases, instead of being replaced by the same species, be succeeded (by virtue of the law which makes a rotation of crops profitable in agriculture) by other kinds, till at last, after a great number of centuries (several thousand years, perhaps), that remarkable diversity of species characteristic of North America, and far exceeding what is seen in European forests, would be established."

* Lyell's Travels in North America, vol. ii. p. 29.

42

MOUNDS OF SANTOS IN BRAZIL.

CHAP. III.

Mounds of Santos in Brazil.

I will next say a few words respecting certain human bones embedded in a solid rock at Santos in Brazil, to which I called attention in my Travels in America in 1842.* I then imagined the deposit containing them to be of submarine origin, an opinion which I have long ceased to entertain. We learn from a memoir of Dr. Meigs, that the River Santos has undermined a large mound, fourteen feet in height, and about three acres in area, covered with trees, near the townof St. Paul, and has exposed to view many skeletons, all inclined at angles between 20° and 25°, and all placed in a similar east and west position.† Seeing, in the Museum of Philadelphia, fragments of the calcareous stone or tufa from this spot, containing a human skull with teeth, and in the same matrix, oysters with serpulæ attached, I at first concluded that the whole deposit had been formed beneath the waters of the sea, or at least, that it had been submerged after its origin, and again upheaved; also, that there had been time since its emergence for the growth on it of a forest of large trees. But after reading again, with more care, the original memoir of Dr. Meigs, I cannot doubt that the shells, like those of eatable kinds, so often accumulated in the mounds of the North American Indians not far from the sea, may have been brought to the place and heaped up with other materials at the time when the bodies were buried. Subsequently, the whole artificial earthwork, with its shells and skeletons, may have been bound together into a solid stone by the infiltration of carbonate of lime, and the mound may therefore be of no higher antiquity than some of those above alluded to on the Ohio, which, as we have seen, have in like manner been exposed in the course of ages to the encroachments and undermining action of rivers.

* Vol. i. p. 200.

† Meigs, Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc., 1828, p. 285.