Page 17 - Demo

Chapter One 17
Before the Bronze Age the bodies of the dead were buried in the earth, but as the Age progressed cremation began to be practised and when chieftains or other prominent people died their bodies were burned. The ashes and bones were then collected in urns and placed in tombs or burial chambers, over which cairns and stones or mounds of earth were raised. These rarely found “Houses of the Dead” as they are colloquially known, these basilicas or “chambered tumuli”-that is, singular stone chambers or temples of round forms, were built underground as at Dowth, or in the heart of an artiicial mound, as at the richly deco- rated and celebrated temple of the sun, Brugh na Bóinne, -‘the Womb or Belly of the Boyne,’ present-day Newgrange, both of which are located in county Meath. It was once wryly ob- served, albeit somewhat disturbingly, that in Ireland, the most imposing structural remains from prehistoric times are the houses of the dead, rather than those of the living!
Now, copper was not the only valuable metal discovered in Ireland. All through the Bronze Age, and for many years afterwards, Ireland was also rich in gold. Even in those distant days, gold was much prized and sought after by all the nations of Europe, and the possession of this precious commodity “put us Irish on the map” so to speak, and right through the Bronze Age, a brisk trade in gold was carried on between Ireland and the rest of Europe. Ancient Jewellery fashioned from Amber, a form of fossil resin which comes from the shores of the Baltic, and Faience, an artiicial gemstone, bright blue in colour, which was manufactured in Egypt and the Near East, and dating from the Bronze Age, have been dis- covered here: proof that luxury items such as this were imported, probably in exchange for gold and bronze objects manufactured here. Further proof that this type of trading existed is gleaned from the knowledge that in nearly every country in Europe, gold ornaments and artefacts of Irish workmanship have been unearthed. In fact, there was a gold earring of dis- tinctively Irish origin and craftsmanship, and dating from 1500 B.C. discovered in Palestine in the early part of the twentieth century. Moreover, the skull of a Barbary ape possibly from North Africa, and dating to this period and presumably brought as a gift to the local ruler by a trader in gold, was discovered near Armagh. As the 19th century herald and antiquarian, Sir William Betham surmised “the advancement of the ancients in the science of navigation has been much underrated”.
As the Bronze Age came to a close, the inhabitants of Ireland had attained a fairly ad- vanced stage of civilisation. They were miners, adept at smelting ore and skilled craftwork-