CHAPTER IX.

GRANARIES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD.

THE storehouses or granaries now in use in Mexico, Peru, and other empires, are not the Pyramids which were built and used in the time of Joseph and Moses. A recent traveller gives the following description of a modern granary situated near Canton, in China:

"Here we saw a large magazine for grain; it was a quadrangular building about 350 feet each way, lined on the outside with plank, and on the whole appeared well adapted for the intended purpose. Such depôts for corn, they (the Chinese) tell us, are very common everywhere, yet, except in this instance, they have hitherto escaped our notice."

From what the same traveller says about some remarkable rocks that he saw in China, there appears to be every likelihood of finding pyramids in that country which, built by Moses and his followers during their sojourn there, still remain unopened after all these ages, even by the present generation of the Chinese, who conquered the country from the colonists left in the empire by the Law-giver. These solitary rocks were situated in plains surrounded by

corn-fields, similar to the situation and position of the Pyramids of Egypt and Mexico. The traveller

says:

"In the course of the day we passed by one town and three villages (proceeding towards Canton from the south), likewise several remarkable rocks, nearly perpendicular on all sides, and about two hundred feet high, perfectly isolated, and unconnected with any elevated ground whatsoever; besides, the circumjacent country is low, level, alluvial soil, well cultivated.

"All these circumstances considered, it is rather difficult to account for the existence of such a phenomenon as these solitary rocks, so remote, too, from any mountain, unless, perhaps, those prodigious masses of solid stone have been, at some very remote period of time, each the nucleus of a hill, in which case they must have been below the surface of the soil, which, being gradually washed down and carried away by the floods, these rocks became denuded, and left exposed in their present situation.

"Another conjecture may be offered on this subject, that probably they have been placed, as now seen, by the operation of the same causes that effected the general deluge, when the globe suffered such dreadful disruptions and convulsions as, according to the Mosaic relation, to shake the very pillars of the earth, and to break up the fountains of the great deep; the truth of this will appear obvious when we consider the nature of that powerful agent which occasioned this memorable catastrophe."

The Pyramids of Mexico are termed by the learned Voyages and Travels, vol. vi.

*

Dr. Robinson temples and mounds of earth; and the Pyramids of Egypt have been mentioned by Bruce and other travellers as natural rocks and mounds. So that it is not extraordinary that a shipwrecked seaman, travelling on foot along the coast of China towards Canton, should call these unexplored pyramids solitary rocks. There are such mounds or rocks in Ireland. Now that country was visited in ancient times by the Phenicians, who were originally a colony of Egyptians, and who must have witnessed the construction, or perhaps even assisted in the building of the Pyramids of Egypt, by command of Joseph, or Zaphnath-paaneah; they also assisted King Solomon in building the Temple in Jerusalem. These Phenicians, then, built pyramids in Ireland, which, though a fertile island, has been subject to frequent visitations of famine. The learned traveller Kohl speaks of these erections, in his work on Ireland, as follows:

"The Moate of Lisserdowling is a round conical hill, about forty feet high, and almost five hundred feet in circumference. It stands in a plain, and is surrounded by corn-fields, and, being planted with trees and white-thorn bushes, presents a stately object on the naked level. On the summit the Moate was flat, with an indentation in the middle, leaving a few stones bare, that seemed to form part of some masonry concealed under the turf, by which the whole of the artificial hill was covered.

"The popular tradition, I was told, assigned the moat as a dwelling-place to an ancient Irish chief of the name of Naghten O'Donnell, and a small by-road in the neighbourhood is still called, after him, Nagh

ten's Lane. The hill stands in high repute throughout the country, and is a favourite resort on fine afternoons, when hundreds may be seen sitting and lying on its sides; but not one of these visitors remains after dark, when the Moate of Lisserdowling, and the lane leading to it, are abandoned to the fairies, or 'good people,' as they are called in Ireland. Nor will anyone touch a stone or a stick on the hill, 'unless they have had a dream,' as my farmer expressed himself, and have had a commission from the good people.'

"I observed on the side of the mount the stump of an old thorn-bush. My guide informed me that the bush itself had been blown down one windy night, many years ago, and had been left to rot on the ground where it fell, no one daring to touch it, though in general the poor people are ready enough to appropriate to themselves anything burnable that they may find by the wayside. Young trees they will steal with very little remorse, but wood growing on one of these fairy mounts is almost always secure from their depredations.

"On the following day I visited a similar hill, the Moate-o'-Ward, which was likewise covered with white thorns, and in the sequel I met with great numbers of these artificial hillocks, of which Ireland contains many more than England or Scotland. The people call them moats, a word used in English to designate the ditch of a fortress. In Irish they are called 'raths,' a word bearing precisely the same signification. They are also sometimes called 'Dane's Mounts'; for in Ireland, as every art of destruction is charitably set down to Cromwell's

account, so every erection of a remote date is attributed to the Danes.

"The popular belief is quite unanimous, therefore, in giving the Danes the credit of having erected these tumuli, as fortresses whence they might hold the country in subjection; and when the Danes had been expelled, an Irish chief here and there chose the deserted fastness for his dwelling-place. The learned are not quite so unanimous in their views as to the origin of these erections. Some go with the stream, and set them down to Danish account; others believe the hillocks to be of a much more ancient date, and to have formed the strongholds of the ancient native kings. In the north of Ireland is a mound of enormous size, said to have been the seat of the kings of Ulster.

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Probably this earthy architecture, which appears to have been so widely diffused over Ireland, was the work of different ages, of various races, and had more objects than one in view. Nearly all the nations of Europe, in the infancy of their civilization, seem to have delighted in the erection of these artificial hills. The whole of Southern Russia is full of them, and we meet with them in Hungary, Turkey, Scandinavia, and Denmark, as well as in England and Ireland; but nowhere in such numbers as in Ireland, whence we may conclude that the ancient Irish must have built many of their raths long before the Danes arrived among them.

"It is also probable that they were erected with different objects in view. Some, we know, were intended as boundary marks, and some, we know, were raised over the remains of distinguished heroes