STONE MONUMENTS, PRIMITIVE. The term primi tive stone monument implies an ancient or rudimentary memorial or mark. Some represent men or things. Others are taber nacles, provided, either with pious or magical intent, that a power or a soul may be induced to dwell therein.
At first, they were memorial—to keep in memory the site of a certain event, or definite spot—perhaps to mark a route, per haps to delimit the bourn of forbidden ground. They would be signposts, of a welcoming, funereal or warning character. Nat ural existing marks were doubtless first used; later, wooden posts where trees were plentiful. Stone heaps or boulders where avail able, would replace wood as less subject to decay and more diffi cult to remove treacherously. Such marks become sacred by natural evolution, so that men fear to remove them. This process varies according to the people's standard of magic or religion. Retribution is to be feared should a memorial be defaced or a boundary stone moved. During Woolley's excavation at Ur in 1924 there was found, in what appeared to be a museum or records department attached to a convent of the Kassite period (c. 1600 B.c.), such a bourn (now in the Baghdad Museum), pho tographs of which were exhibited in 1925 in the basement of the Assyrian Department at the British Museum. On this stone were graven the boundaries of the property it had presumably once marked, the names of the owner and of the witnesses to the "deed," and a short imprecation threatening the curses of the gods whose emblems were carved upon the stone should this testi mony be destroyed. The stage from the bourn to the idea of a witness-stone is almost imperceptible. The stone becomes some thing on which solemn oaths can be sworn, as is exempli fied by pillar-stones and their folk-lore, especially such as have a hole through which may be passed the clasped hands of two per sons making a contract. The Lia Fail at Tara and other stones on which Irish kings and chiefs took their oaths at their inauguration, and the Bocca della Verita in Rome, display the persistence of such an idea into historic times. Similar traditions have clung for longer periods to witness-stones or pierres de justice among the primitive stone monuments of Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Scot land and Ireland, dating from about 400 B.C. to A.D. 300.
Once a memorial pillar or a witness-stone became invested with such a sacral character it would easily itself become the object of propitiatory rites, especially if marked with sacred emblems. Thus
the drivers travelling the lonely desert routes uniting India, China, Tibet, Russia and Persia pour libations of wheel oil on the anthro pomorphic stone wayside cairns and sacred wooden pillars set up at certain stages of their road. (See also Genesis xxviii., 16-22.) As to the representation of the human form or of its life giving organs, the more primitive idea is not the symbology asso ciated with fertility cults, but the intention to represent a par ticular man or a supernatural being in the likeness of man how ever crude. This is demonstrable, because although standing stones or menhirs rudely hewn into effigies, recognizably female by their indications of femininity (and almost certainly intended to represent or symbolize a Mother Goddess), are compatible with a very primitive knowledge of physiology, and call for no esoteric or philosophical explanation, the case with phallic (see PHALLICISM) representations is rather different. A religion call ing for the recognition of that symbol as representative of fer tility (as distinct from fecundity) presupposes a society cognizant of the respective parts played by the male and female functions in nature in the production of offspring, and long familiar with husbandry and cattle-raising, whereas in very primitive societies the physical association of the sexes, though regulated by custom, is often unrelated to paternity. The child is known to be physio logically produced by its mother. Socially it may belong to its maternal uncle (see AvUNCULATE), uterine relationship between brothers and sisters being easily demonstrable. Even when the observed association of maternal fecundity with post-initiate sexual connection brings about recognition of cause and effect in specific cases, there is still some way to go intellectually before the symbol of male fertility can take the natural place in the ideology of magic or religion that is taken by the crude representa tion of a human form with female breasts. The stone pillar that is recognizably a phallus is not on the same primitive plane with the menhir having indications of eyes, nose, mouth and breasts, but rather with the esoteric symbology of the holed stone.