Page 275 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

the plain, only a few at such distance that a river haul was of
any advantage in transport. Still, the sea captain, talking fa­
miliarly of the transport and raising of the obelisks of Hatshepsut

and Thothmes HI along the Nile, got himself and his polyglot
crew engaged by the Breton engineers who had been commis­
sioned to raise the new monument. For weeks they sweated on

the long land haul of the stones, and used their familiarity with
block and tackle to assist in the raising of mighty uprights and
capstones. The actual shaping of the stones was done by Breton
and local masons, who scientifically battered irregularities away
with stone mauls and finished the surface with bronze chisels.

Even here some of the crew could give a hand, for it was after
all the same technique as was used in the Egyptian quarries,
where several of the sailors had served not entirely voluntary
terms. And a couple of the Greek seamen with stonemason ex­

perience were even allowed, on their own suggestion, to increase
the religious potency of the monument by carving their own
holy symbols, reliefs of their native daggers and axes, upon sev­
eral of the stones.

The priestly colleges of half the principalities of the British
Isles had combined to raise the new monument, with funds and
workmen contributed by all the rich princes of the south. For
Stonehenge was the most venerable of all the sites of solar wor­

ship, a place of pilgrimage for all England and much of northern
Europe. The embankment and the rough monolith beyond its en­
trance, in line with the midsummer sunrise, had been raised over
four hundred years before (they were as old as Hampton Court

Palace is now), and the concentric stone circles within had
stood for two hundred years or so, built by the beaker chieftains
of the downland. The wealthy priests and princes of south Eng­

land had now been talking for some years of building a more
imposing temple, and many schemes had been put forward.
There had even been a tentative reconstruction, and the original
stones had been taken down and partly re-erected in a new pat­
tern. Finally it had been agreed, on the advice of travelers who

had seen the mighty pylons of the Egyptian monarchs, that new
and larger stones should be used, and the old stones piously in­
corporated merely as an inner circle between a great outer ring