Chapter 13: 'Cup and Ring' an Old Problem Solved

History and antiquity supply our curious minds with many pleasant profitless exercises. Even in these days of education there are still many persons who have heard of the Man in the Iron Mask, and would like to know who he was. Nobody, of course, reads the ‘Letters of Junius, ‘ but many would be glad to be certain as to who wrote them.

My riddle is infinitely more remote, but it has this merit: that I think I can unriddle it. If ever you roamed on that moor of the Cheviot Hills which is near Chatton Park (I think on Lord Tankerville’s ground), you may have noticed, engraved on the boulders, central cup-like depressions, surrounded by incised concentric circles. Who hollowed out these devices, why, and in what age?

I remember putting these questions when I first saw the ‘scalps’ of whinstone, just swelling out of the turf among the heather, on a beautiful day of September. It was a lonely spot, where victual never grew; about us were the blue heights of the Cheviots, below us the fabulosus amnis of Till, that drowns three men to one drowned by Tweed. My friend told me that some said the stones were places of Druid human sacrifice, and others, men of common sense, held that the herd-boys carved the circles out of sheer idleness.

But these answers will not pass. There were no herd-boys nor Druids in Central Australia, nor on the Rio Negro in Brazil, among the Waimara Indians, nor in Fiji, nor in Georgia of old, nor in Zululand, where these decorative markings occur with others of primeval character. In our own country they are found, not only on scalps of rock, but on the stones of ‘Druid circles, ‘ from Inverness-shire to Lancashire, Cumberland, and the Isle of Man. They also occur on great stones arranged in avenues; on cromlechs (one huge horizontal stone supported on others which are erect); on the stones of chambered tumuli (artificial mounds) in Yorkshire; on stone ‘kist’ or coffins, in Scotland, Ireland, and in Dorset; on prehistoric obelisks, or solitary ‘standing stones, ‘ in Argyll; on walls in underground Picts’ houses in the Orkneys and Forfarshire; in prehistoric Scottish forts; near old camps; as well as on isolated rocks, scalps, and stones. Analogous double spirals occur at New Grange, in Ireland, at the entrance of the great gallery leading to the domed chamber; in Scandinavia; in Asia Minor; in China and Zululand; in Australia, India, America, North and South, and in Fiji.[1]

Now, who made these marks, when, and why? Sir James Simpson says: ‘They are archæological enigmas, which we have no present power of solving.’ He cites some guesses. The markings are ‘archaic maps or plans of old circular camps and cities.’ They are sundials--but they occur in dark chambers of sepulchres, or underground houses! They stand for sun, or moon, or for Lingam worship. They are Roman, or they are Phœnician--a theory on which much learning has been wasted.

To all these guesses Sir James Simpson opposed the solution that the markings are merely decorative. ‘From the very earliest historic periods in the architecture of Egypt, Assyria, Greece, &c, down to our own day, circles, single or double, and spirals have formed, under various modifications, perhaps the most common types of lapidary decoration.’ It appears in Polynesian tattooing, this love of spirals and volutes. But, added Sir James, ‘that they were emblems or symbols, connected in some way with the religious thoughts and doctrines of those that carved them, appears to me to be rendered probable, at least, by the position and circumstances in which we occasionally find them placed, ‘ as on the lids of stone coffins and mortuary urns. Their date must be ‘very remote.’ They preceded writing and tradition. They are found in company with polished neolithic stone weapons, as in Brittany, without any remains of the metals, save in one case, of gold. The markings are certainly, in Australia, earlier than the use of metals. Sir James found by experiment that the markings could be made even on Aberdeen granite with a flint celt and a wooden mallet. He reckoned them earlier than the arrival of the Celtic race, and asked for evidence of their existence in Africa, America, or Polynesia. He did not know the Fijian example in Williams’s work on the Fijians, nor the American and Australian examples.

Sir James did not live to hear much about these mysterious marks in remote and savage lands. But, in 1875, Professor Daniel Wilson discovered, or rather reported his discovery of, cups and rings on a granite boulder in Georgia. The designs are quite of the familiar orthodox sort, and rocks covered with deep cup-marks occur in Ohio.[2] Now there are romantic antiquaries, all for Druids and Phœnicians; and there are sardonic antiquaries, who like to rub the gilt off the gingerbread. Dr. Wilson was of the latter class, and explained the cups as holes made by early men in grinding stone pestles. The concentric rings may have been drawn round the cups ‘for amusement.’ This is clamping, but early man did not use stone kists and the inner walls of sepulchres as grindstones; yet on these the marks occur. Nor would he climb an almost inaccessible rock to find his grindstone; yet the summit of such a rock has the decorations, in the parish of Tannadyce (Forfarshire). We may, therefore, discard Dr. Wilson’s theory as a general solution of the problem. Sir James Simpson left it with the answer that the marks are decorative, plus religious symbolism.[3] His guess, as I think I can prove, or, at least, cause to seem probable, was correct. The cups and circles, with other marks, were originally decorative, with a symbolical and religious meaning in certain cases. How I have reached this conclusion I go on to show.

When you want to understand an old meaningless custom or belief, found in the middle of civilisation, you try to discover the belief or custom in some region where it possesses intelligible life. Then you may reckon that, where you now find it without meaning, it once meant what it now does where it is full of vitality, or meant something analogous.

The place where the concentric circles and other markings have a living and potent signification I discovered by pure accident. I had been reading the proofs of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s valuable book on the ‘Native Tribes of Central Australia’ (Macmillan). There I had noted plenty of facts about the native churinga, or ‘sacred things, ‘ flat oval pieces of wood or stone, covered with concentric circles, cups, and other decorations, which are read, or deciphered, as records of the myths and legendary history of the native race. These churinga are of various sizes, down to a foot or less in length. I did not think of them in connection with our cups, circles, and so forth on our boulders and standing stones. But a friend chanced to come into my study, who began to tell me about the singular old site, Dumbuck, discovered by Mr. W. A. Donnelly (July 1898), under high-tide mark in the Clyde estuary, near Dumbarton. ‘The odd thing, ‘ said my friend, ‘is that they have found small portable stones, amulets marked in the same way as the cup and ring marked rocks, ‘ and he began to sketch a diagram. ‘Why, that’s a churinga, ‘ said I, ‘a Central Australian churinga, ‘ enlightened by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen. My friend, after being informed as to churinga, told me that other examples had been dug up, also by Mr. Donnelly, in an ancient fort near the other site, at a place called Dunbuie. Here, then, I had things very like churinga, and of the same markings as our boulders, kists, and so on, in two Scottish sites, where I understand neither pottery nor metal has yet been detected. Next, I found that the marks which the Australians engrave on their small churinga, they also paint on boulders, rock-walls, and other fixtures in the landscape, on sacred ground, tabooed to women.

The startling analogy between Australian and old Scottish markings saute aux yeux.

On the cover of Sir James Simpson’s book, stamped in gold, is a central set of six concentric circles, surrounding a cup. From the inmost circle a groove goes to the circumference of the outer circle (the circles often occur without this radial groove), and there the line gives a wriggle, suggesting that the circle was evolved out of a spiral. Above and below this figure are a similar one with three and another with four concentric circles; at each side are two-circled and one-circled specimens with the wriggled line, and two cups and circles with no wriggle. Now compare fig. 131, p. 631, of Messrs Spencer and Gillen. Here we have the churinga ilkinia, or sacred rock-drawing, in red and white, of the honey ant totem in the Warramunga tribe. Here are, first, seven concentric circles, through the centre of which goes a straight line of the same breadth (only found among the Warramunga), while to each extremity are added two concentric circles of small dimensions, ending in a cross. Around, as on Sir James’s cover, are smaller sets of less numerous concentric circles, exactly like Sir James’s, except for the radial groove which ends in a wriggle. Again (fig. 124, p. 615), we have two sets of concentric circles with white dots answering to cups, and, where the third set of circles should be, is a volute, as at New Grange, in Ireland, and in many other examples in our islands.

Now, in Central Australia the decorative motives, or analogous motives, of the permanent rock-paintings are repeated on the small portable churinga, which are deciphered by the blacks in a religious, or rather in a mythical, sense. It is, therefore, arguable that the small portable Scottish cup and circle marked stones, only recently discovered, bore the same relation to the engravings on permanent stones, scalps, and boulders as do the Australian churinga to the Australian sacred rock-paintings. They may have been portable sacred things.

I have been unable to visit Dumbuck, now in course of excavation, and have only seen some casts and pen-and-ink sketches sent to me by Mr. Donnelly. But I have examined the similar objects from Dunbuie, in the museum at Edinburgh. The antiquaries looked dubiously on them, because they had seen no such matters before (they might have done so in Ireland), because a shell, with a very modern scratched face, was among the finds, and because a few of the markings on one or two stones look recent and fresh. But I argue that a Dumbarton humourist wishing to hoax us Monkbarnses would hardly ‘salt’ an old site with objects unknown to Scottish antiquaries, yet afterwards discovered in Central Australia. How could the idea occur to him? A forger would forge things known, such as flint weapons; he would not forge novelties, which, later, are found to tally with savage sacred things in actual use.

Many of the Dunbuie finds are engraved in Mr. Millar’s paper on Dunbuie.[4] But he has not engraved the most unmistakable churinga, a small oval slab of stone, with an ornament of little cups following its outline (much as in an Irish instance), and provided, like stone churinga in Australia, with a hole for suspension.

He does engrave certain hitherto unheard-of articles-spearheads of slate, two supplied with suspension holes. One (p. 294) has a pattern of the simplest, like a child’s drawing of a larch, which recurs in Australia.[5] That these slate spear-heads, pierced for suspension, were used in war I doubt, though some Australians do use spear-heads ‘of a flinty slate;’ and where flint is so scarce, as in Scotland, hard slate may be used--for example, in North America.[6] I rather regard the slate weapons as amulets, or churinga, analogous to the very old and rare boomerang-shaped churinga of the Arunta (lizard totem) of Central Australia. Mr. Millar observes: ‘They have all been saturated with oil or fat, as water does not adhere to them, but runs off as from a greasy surface.’ Now the Australian churinga are very frequently rubbed with red ochre, and made greasy with ‘hand grease’--a singular coincidence. Footmarks are among the sacred Australian rock-paintings with a legendary sense. They also occur, engraved on rock in Brittany, Ireland, on ‘The Fairy Stone’ (ilkinia) in Glenesk, and on ‘The Witches’ Stone’ at Monzie, associated with cups and concentric circles.[7] These close analogies point all in one direction.

Meaningless in Europe, what meaning have these designs in Australia? Though certainty is impossible, I take it that they were first purely decorative, before the mythical and symbolical meaning was read into them by the savages. They occur on the mystic ‘bull-roarers’ of Central Queensland, but I do not learn that in Queensland the circles and so on are interpreted or deciphered as among the Arunta.[8] Still, they occur here in a religious connection--the bull-roarer being swung at the mysteries--and they are carved on trees at mysteries held far south in New South Wales.[9] But even in Central Australia the markings sometimes occur as purely decorative, on one rock or other object, while on others they are sacred, and are interpreted as records of legends, [10] according to Spencer and Gillen. There are ‘ordinary rock-paintings, ‘ and certain other drawings, in many cases not distinguishable from some of the first series, so far as their form is concerned, but belonging to a class all of which are spoken of as churinga ilkinia, and are regarded as sacred because they are associated with totems. Each local totemic group has certain of these specially belonging to the group, and in very many cases preserved on rock-surfaces in spots which are strictly tabu to the women, children, and uninitiated men.’ One of the commonest I represents a snake coming out of a hole in a rock, ‘ which the wriggle out of the cup in our circle-marked stones would stand for fairly well. Some designs are only ‘play-work;’ others exactly similar, on another spot, have a definite meaning. The meaning is read, where the spot is sacred ground. The concentric circles are ‘believed, on good ground, to have been derived from an original spiral.’ ‘It is much more easy to imagine a series of concentric circles originating out of a spiral than to imagine a spiral originating out of a series of concentric circles.’ In this country the spiral seems to be later than the circle.