We’re up early, down for breakfast before the folks at the Stillorgan Park have their act together, onto bus 46A, and on O’Connell Street about an hour before our tour leaves for the tomb at Newgrange.
The tomb — really, more of an observatory that came to be used as a tomb — is officially the most ancient site I’ve ever visited. Newgrange was built by Neolithic farmers 5000 years ago. Think about that for a moment: five thousand years ago. Newgrange stood whole and complete a full 500 years before Egyptians carved the first stones for the pyramids at Giza — three thousand years before Christ.
The structure itself is a dome of stone, covered with earth. Originally, the exterior was covered with fist-sized hunks of reflective white quartz. (And is again, thanks to recent restorations.) The entire dome was ringed or “curbed” with wide, low stones quarried more than 80 kilometers away and transported over hilly, heavily-forested land to the building site.
On these stones (and on the mammoth stone that guards the entrance), the builders etched bizarre symbols: circles within circles, crude suns, intricate triple whorls. The Neolithic period is pre-historic, so no one has any clue as to the meaning and purpose of the glyphs. Were they hieroglyphs? Warnings? Charms? Calendars? The fingerprints of God? We don’t know. We can’t know.
I stood today in the heart of the mound — a tiny, claustrophobic chamber buried beneath thousands of tons of freely stacked rock. Once a year — in December, for a few days on either side of the shortest day of the year — the springtime sun streams through a roofbox cut above the entryway. For seventeen minutes, the inner chamber flares with light. When the solstice is past, darkness reigns for another year.
We know the builders were farmers — could Newgrange have been an elaborate clock, designed to dramatically identify the shortest day of the year and inform the community of impending spring? Is it a transporter, designed to trap the sunlight of Earth’s darkest day and use it to send departed souls home?
So many questions.
And no answers. No answers at all.
Um, the solstice is in December, not March. Winter sun. Did your tour guide mention that every eight years, Venus brightens the chamber and moves off just before the sun rises? And who says no one has a clue about the glyphs? Have any astrologers looked at them? Hmmmm.You say no answers at all. I say no answers yet.h
Thanks for catching the December/March thing. Don’t know why I wrote March!
The guides didn’t mention the Venus event, and I hadn’t heard of it.
After you mentioned it, though, I Googled Newgrange and Venus, and found references to “scholars Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas” and the eight-year appearance of Venus in the Newgrange lightbox. Interesting!
You should read their book; Uriel’s Machine. Way more interesting than you could ever imagine! It’s a bit of a read, but it’s incredibly worth it! It’s one of those that you can read a chapter and put it down for a month to think about it, then pick it up again. I’m about ready to read it again. It’s filled with all sorts of things that I want to know, not just have read.~M~