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The Clyde Mystery, a Study in Forgeries and Folklore, a non-fiction book by Andrew Lang |
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XIX - PARALLELISM BETWEEN THE DISPUTED OBJECTS AND OTHER OBJECTS ELSEWHERE |
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_ XIX - PARALLELISM BETWEEN THE DISPUTED OBJECTS AND OTHER OBJECTS ELSEWHERE On Clyde (if the disputed things be genuine) we find decorated plaques or slabs of soft stone, of very various dimensions and shapes. In Australia some of these objects are round, many oval, others elongated, others thin and pointed, like a pencil; others oblong--while on Clyde, some are round, one is coffin-shaped, others are palette-shaped, others are pear- shaped (the oval tapering to one extremity), one is triangular, one is oblong. {77} In Australia, as on Clyde, the stones bear some of the archaic markings common on the rock faces both in Scotland and in Central Australia: on large rocks they are painted , in Australia, in Scotland they are incised . I maintain that there is a singularly strong analogy between the two sets of circumstances, Scottish and Australian; large rocks inscribed with archaic designs; smaller stones inscribed with some of these designs. Is it not so? Dr. Munro, on the other hand, asserts that there is no such parallelism. But I must point out that there is, to some extent, an admitted parallelism. "The familiar designs which served as models to the Clyde artists"--"plain cups and rings, with or without gutter channels, spirals, circles, concentric circles, semicircles, horseshoe and harp- shaped figures, etc.," occur, or a selection of them occurs, both on the disputed objects, and on the rocks of the hills. So Dr. Munro truly says (p. 260). The same marks, plain cups, cups and rings, spirals, concentric circles, horseshoes, medial lines with short slanting lines proceeding from them, like the branches on a larch, or the spine of a fish, occur on the rocks of the Arunta hills, and also on plaques of stone cherished and called churinga ("sacred") by the Arunta. {78} Here is what I call "parallelism." Dr. Munro denies this parallelism. There are, indeed, other parallelisms with markings other than those of the rocks at Auchentorlie which Dr. Munro regards as the sources of the faker's inspiration. Thus, on objects from Dumbuck (Munro, plate XV. figs, 11 and 12), there are two "signs": one is a straight line, horizontal, with three shorter lines under it at right angles, the other a line with four lines under it. These signs "are very frequent in Trojan antiquities," and on almost all the "hut urns" found "below the lava at Marino, near Albano, or on ancient tombs near Corneto." Whatever they mean, (and Prof. Sayce finds the former of the two "signs" "as a Hittite hieroglyph,") I do not know them at Auchentorlie. After "a scamper among the surrounding hills," the faker may have passed an evening with Dr. Schliemann's Troja (1884, pp. 126, 127) and may have taken a hint from the passages which have just been cited. Or he may have cribbed the idea of these archaic markings from Don Manuel de Gongora y Martinez, his Antiguedades Pre-historicas de Andalucia (Madrid, 1868, p. 65, figures 70, 71). In these Spanish examples the marks are, clearly, "schematised" or rudimentary designs of animals, in origin. Our faker is a man of reading. But, enfin , the world is full of just such markings, which may have had one meaning here, another there, or may have been purely decorative. "Race" has nothing to do with the markings. They are "universally human," though, in some cases, they may have been transmitted by one to another people. The reader must decide as to whether I have proved my parallelisms, denied by Dr. Munro, between the Clyde, Australian, and other markings, whether on rocks or on smaller stones. {80a} It suffices me to have tried to prove the parallelism between Australian and Clyde things, and to record Dr. Munro's denial thereof--"I unhesitatingly maintain that there is no parallelism whatever between the two sets of objects." {80b}
{78} Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia , figs. 20, 21, 22, 133; Northern Tribes of Central Australia , figs. 89, 92, 80, 81. {80a} I have no concern with an object, never seen by Dr. Munro, or by me, to my knowledge, but described as a "churinga"; in Journal of British Archaeological Association , Sept. 1904, fig. 4, Munro, p. 246. {80b} Munro, p. 246. _ |
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