LECTURES ON THE PRIM.ZEVAL WORLD.
Mr. Luke Burke, editor of the Ethnological Journal, began, on Thursday, at the Marylebone Literary -and Scientific Institution, a course.of five lectures on Primteval and Ancient Monuments. His point of view is peculiar-being that history is only to be believed where present external evidence exists to confirm it ; and the thesis of his -first discourse was the startling proposition, "Greece and Italy older than Egypt ; or the Cyclop- ean monuments of Southern Europe and Asia Minor viewed in their relations to Classic, Egyptian, and Oriental archwology." Faith, said Mr. Burke, is no safe basis for archteology ; and history goes with it. As in geology, we should reason from visible facts back to invisible. A traveller of the present day would find everywhere in the United States the evidences of a recent civilization dashing with no civilization at all : this is precisely the ease with Egypt. There you will see no antiquity remoter than the Pyramids, which indicate civihza- tion already advanced. Not that the lecturer would detract from the positive antiquity of Egypt, but there is something beyond her. In North-western Europe we find Druidical circles, cromlechs, &c. ; monu- ments which are technically assigned to three several periods—the stone, the brass, and the iron. The stone age, in which the bodies of the dead are buried, and the implements found are all of stone, rude pottery, &c., ex- tends from Southern Sweden and Denmark as far South as Spain. The brass age, in which the bodies are burned, and implements appear of metal, is common to the same countries, and reaches a wider area North and South. The iron age has left frequent monuments in Norway and Sweden. Now, is it not the case that English guns and other objects are found stele present day in the remotest corners of the earth, and among savages ? Why then did not Egyptian civilization, if it preceded ours, find its way hither ? The monuments referred to indicate great civilized and settled communities in the infancy of knowledge. Cromlechs are found as far as Tunis and Southern India along the coast-line ; showing that navigation spread the use of them. They come therefore to the borders of Egypt ; and the Egyptians could not be so exclusive or self- contained as not to give and receive in such matters ; they had not men enough to produce their own works, had they not been excessively rich, —and how rich, unless by commerce ? Egypt must have made herself felt to the extremities of Europe at the height of her splendour; yet other countries got nothing from her. The cromlech could not have existed had Egypt preceded it. Another class of monuments are the Bo-called Cyclopean works of Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor, commonly ascribed to the Pelasgians—a people who may have existed, or may not. They exhibit walls of citadels made of huge blocks of uncut atones, with- out cement ; and, in a later date, of stones cut in polygons. *These again are the works of civilized men, which reach to the coasts of Spain, and probably to Tunis—men of artistic faculty. Would they not have had tools and artificers from Egypt, if Egypt had possessed such at the time ? And yet we are asked to believe that the Greeks were a colony from Egypt, led by Danaiis during the eighteenth dynasty. Commerce is, as it were, centrifugal and centripetal; it attracts all talent and wealth, and diffuses them again. It is so now, and must have been then. The Cyclop- ean monuments of cut stone, which are found in Northern Africa and Southern France, in Ireland applied to ecclesiastical purposes, and just faintly to be recognized in Egypt, indicate an advanced community, who could not possibly have failed-to.avail themselves of any existing advan- tages. Mr. Burke concluded by apologizing for presenting in an-extem- pore form views which he has thought over for months and years, which he shares with no one, and which, if true, are in advance of the age. Succeeding lectures.are to show-that classic history is a fiction ; that the British Islands are the oldest existing centre of monumental archeo- logy; that a monumental and mythic connexion existed between Europe and America in pre-historic times ; and that Europe is the primasval centre of the highest intellectuality. Such is the wide task Mr. Burke proposes to himself.
As regards the argument of the lecture we have described, it will be observed to be based entirely on the assumption that a higher state-of monumental construction in one country could not have preceded or co- existed with a lower one in another, provided that other had got beyond savagery. The assumption is certainly a wide one. The means of dif- fusion at the present day are so much greater than in the days of crom- lechs, Cyclopean architecture, and pyramids, that we doubt whether any induction from present facts will fix the facts of the past in such .a mat- ter; and, .if we are to take the more advanced art as the inevitable suc- cessor of the ruder, ignoring the voice of history, we shall discover that Europe of the seventh and eighth centuries—not to mention later periods, to which, however, the same argument applies—preceded Phidias and Ictinus. Or, if -Britain mutt have appropriated the civilization of Egypt, if it had existed at the time, why had it not, before Cfesar's in- vasion, appropriated the civilization of Rome ? We are not quite pre- pared-to reject history on that point.
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