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166
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
(June, 1879.
monuments in Persia, but doubtless many exist, and elder travellers have noticed some which do not appear to have been examined again. In his Travels in Persia, &c. vol. II.p. 123, Sir W. Ouseley mentions having been shown in the neighbourhood of Darab an extensive piece of ground enclosed within a ditch and a bank or rampart of earth proportionably high, the Persians called it Kaldi Deháyeh or Deh-i-aih = *a fortress. Within the enclosure was "an extraordinary upright stone, single, and at least 20 feet high. Concerning this stone many wonder- ful stories are related : one that a woman in the time of king Darab, having been guilty of treachery towards him, was saddenly petrified, and bas continued to exist, but in the form of this stone." In another part of the enclosure, on & rising ground, were "several large and rude stones forming a cluster irregularly circular,--almost Druidical, as the word is commonly nsed now. Some are from 20 to 25 feet high. One, very tall, stands nearly in the middle; an- other, toward the west, resembles a table or altar; and under two or three are recesses or small caverns." These and the first described single stone are figured in the Miscellaneous Plate at the end of the volume, and are evidently a vast circle of prehistoric stones, enclosed, as Abury and some other great circles were, by a trench and embankment,-in that, as in general appearance, closely resembling European exam. ples. I know not whether this remarkable spot has since been visited and described. In another place, at p. 80 of the same volume, Sir William describes what he calls "a fire-altar, now called the Stone of the Fire-temple, a single upright stone between 10 and 11 feet high, each of its four sides 3 feet 6 or 7 inches broad at the lower part, not quite so much above." On the southern and western sides are circles one foot in diameter, and sunk an inch in the stone, the western containing a nearly obliterated inscription, apparently Pahlavi, the other circle blank. The top of the stone was hollowed out into a bowl 10 or 11 inches deep, which Sir William supposes to have been intended to contain the
materials for the sacred fire. "A rude low fence or wall of large stones encloses the stone, having a narrow entrance on the south formed of two or three stones of very considerable dimensions." From this account, as well as from the figure of the stone (given in his plate 32), I should rather consider it to be a menhir, or simple standingstone. The circles, with the inscription, may have been graven in after-days, and the hollow on the top, instead of being a receptacle for the sacred fire, seems rather analogous to the "rock-basins" often found on or near prehistoricstones and rocks in Europe-for example, on the tops of KesTor and the Puggie stone' near Chagford, on the border of the Dartmoor in Devonshire; large symmetrical basins are hollowed out in the rock, which were certainly never intended for sacred fires. It may be noted, in passing, that with reference to the strange custom of interring bodies piecemeal in earthen vessels, touched upon in Ind. Ant. rol. VII. p. 177, Sir W. Ouseley found an instance of it on the plain of Bushehr, where urns of a peculiar shape and buried in & peculiar way abounded about two feet below the surface. The arns were cylindrical with pointed ends, and at the mouth a bowl or basin, circumference 2, thickness one-third of an inch, made of clay, without any ornamentation, and closely filled with sand and human bones. The urns lay horizontally in a straight line from east to west, the extremity of one nearly touching the head of the next. Sir William himself disinterred three or four, and found them full of skulls and bones, which must have been put in piecemeal; they were said to exist in hundreda, but he could not hear of them being found anywhere but at Bushehr. No such custom ever existed amongst Musalmâns or Parsis: Travels, vol. I. p. 218, urns figured in plate 22.
Sir John Chardin, in his Travels into Persia through the Black Sea and the country of Colchis, in 1671, reports that a few leagues from Tauris "they passed large circles of hewn stone, which the Persians affirm to be a great sign that the Caous making war in Media held a council
raised mound covered with stone, like a grave, but also possibly an altar for the sacred fire. All were evidently very old, mouldering and dilapidated, and no stone of tho kind was said to be found in any part of the country. There was nothing Mahometan or Finde in their style; the people ascribed them to the Guebres, to whom everything uncommon or inexplicable is popularly referred. Largo mounds of earth and stone were scattered over the neighbour.
ing desert for considerable distances. Travels, pp. 126-7.
Still Sir William's supposition may probably be right. Joseph's Tomb, close to Jacob's Well, is described as having two short pillars, one st the head, and one at the foot, with shallow cap-shaped hollows at their tops, blackened by fire, the Jews burning small articles, bandkerchiefs, gold lace, &c. in them. Conder's Tent work in Palestine, vol. I. p. 74.
