History’s Greatest Mysteries
Who built Stonehenge – and why?
Chosen by Mike Pitts
When the crowds have gone and jackdaws strut high above on the megalithic lintels, I can bask in the quiet majesty of Stone- henge. It is 40 years since I first directed an excavation there. In that time, we have learnt more about the monument and the people who erected it than I imagined possible. But can we at last say why Stonehenge was built? I would say no. The more we learn, the greater the mystery.
We build our picture of the ancient past from things we dig up and things we imagine. The oldest stories about Stone- henge tell how a wizard flew the stones across from Ireland. You can still make out the imprint of a heel where the devil flung one of the megaliths at a friar. On another stone, water, reddened by algae, pools like sacrificed maidens’ blood.
Historical inquiry, finding no record of Stonehenge’s construction, sought to pin the achievement on known ancient peoples from other countries: Greeks, Romans and early medieval Danes. Such speculation was stilled in 1901, when the first scientific excavation at the site exposed nothing that wasn’t already recognised as the tools and debris of prehistoric Britons. Nonetheless, the structure’s extraordinary design and materials meant that the possibility of Mediterranean connections – even a Greek architect – survived into the 1960s. But by then, most archaeologists had embraced the modern view: Stonehenge was entirely the creation of indigenous Neolithic peoples.
The argument then moved from who built it to what sort of society was responsible for it. Was it the ultimate symbol of a highly ranked culture – a chiefdom, perhaps – where the big monuments were expressions of status, power and means of control? Or was it a focal point in an egalitarian world that needed places for people to come together from wide areas, to trade, socialise and engage in communal rituals and ceremonies?
If these theories about a complex monument with a suitably complex history are more helpful than the one-line ideas that are popular in the media – it was a sex symbol, a computer, an observatory or an amplifier – still none get close to truly explaining Stonehenge.
Developments in archaeology have swung the balance of inquiry heavily in favour of evidence from the times – things we dig up. With new scientific innovations, more excavations and more archaeologists asking more questions, we now have significantly more data, as well as more types of data, than I could have imagined when I stood by my trench 40 years ago. However, the result is not that we can now answer the question: why Stonehenge? It’s in fact the opposite. The more we learn, the more we realise how astonishingly technically accomplished – and downright strange – Stonehenge really was.
“How Grand!” wrote Sir Richard Colt Hoare, a British antiquary and archaeologist, when contemplating Stonehenge in 1810. “How Wonderful! How Incomprehensible!”
One of archaeology’s great achievements of the past two centuries has been to prove Hoare right: Stonehenge truly is incomprehensible.
Mike Pitts is an archaeologist and author. His most recent book is Digging Up Britain: Ten Discoveries, a Million Years of History (Thames and Hudson, 2019)
Could Roman soldiers have reached China?
Chosen by Catherine Nixey
The sound alone would have been terrifying. A Roman legion contained around 5,000 men; 5,000 men had 10,000 feet. Each of those 10,000 feet was shod in caligae, the famous Roman hobnailed military sandals. The sound of just one of these shoes slapping against stone signalled to the empire’s enemies that trouble was on its way; the cacophony made by 10,000 is all but unthinkable.
Yet it is not the sound of Roman legions that, at the distance of two millennia, is the most compelling – it is their silences. One such silence enveloped the legions of Crassus who fought against the Parthian empire at the battle of Carrhae in what is now Turkey.
Crassus should never have stepped onto the battlefield. He was wealthy, so much so that the famously affluent Croesus paled in comparison to him. But during combat, gold is no substitute for an affinity with sharpened steel. The omens for the battle had been terrible – and, it transpired, devastatingly accurate. By the end of that dark day in
53 BC, Crassus’s son had been beheaded, with the decapitated head paraded on a spear before his father. Crassus, his heart broken, lost his own head a little later.
The battle would become infamous as one of Rome’s worst ever military defeats. And the thousands of Roman soldiers who hadn’t lost their lives were taken captive and transported east. Although the Roman poet Horace suggested the remnants of the legions had married Parthians, their true fate remained shrouded in mystery.
But in the mid-20th century, Homer Dubs, an expert in Chinese studies based at Oxford, argued that they might have travelled further east than originally thought – potentially several thousand miles further. A few years after the battle of Carrhae, during the siege of a city in China, some mercenaries exhibited military behaviour that hadn’t been seen before in the country: they interlocked their shields so closely against enemy fire that they resembled a ‘fish scale’. The term is unique in Chinese literature. However, interlocking shields was one of the Roman army’s signature moves, known as the testudo formation.
At around the same time in China, a city named Liqian (the ancient Chinese word for ‘Rome’) was founded. Was this the final destination of those Roman soldiers who had survived the battle of Carrhae? The theory is still unproven, but perhaps one day we will learn where the staccato beat of their caligae finally came to a halt.
Catherine Nixey’s books include The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (Macmillan, 2017)
Where is Cleopatra’s tomb?
Chosen by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Antony and Cleopatra’s doomed love story has captivated the world for centuries. The Roman general, beset by grief and shame following his final defeat during the battle of Alexandria at the hands of his foe, Octavian, turned
