608 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
and the inauguration of the Age of Metals. If Reisner’s theory of the origin of 
copper-working in Egypt be admitted, it follows as a necessary corollary that the 
Age of Stone came to a close first in Egypt, and in other countries only at some 
later time, as the Egyptian knowledge of metal-working gradually became diffused 
from tribe to tribe amongst her neighbours, and from them to others more remote. 
It probably took more than a thousand years for this knowledge (and with it the 
Age of Metals) to reach Western Europe, and more than two thousand years to 
reach Eastern Asia; and possibly another thousand years more for it to cross 
the Pacific to America. It never reached Australia until modern Europeans took 
it there. 
It is common to find definite evidence, both in the physical characteristics of 
the human remains buried in association with these monuments and in the 
objects buried with them, of intercourse with neighbouring peoples at the time 
megalithic structures were erected. These monuments were not built by any 
particular group of people or race, who wandered about from place to place 
throughout the greater part of the world erecting these memorials of their pil- 
srimage ; nor are they the results of some common impulse of humanity to evolve 
in widely separated localities the idea of constructing stone monuments of similar 
design and for similar purposes. They are rather the material witnesses to the 
spread of one definite idea, which was handed on from people to people, each 
population giving to its neighbour a contribution of its own flesh and blood, and 
with this some of its material culture, customs, and beliefs; and that such a 
radiation of new practices took place when the new knowledge of metals was 
forcing more intimate relations between neighbouring peoples and gradually 
leavening the sluggish culture of the Stone Age. 
In the Neolithic Age in North Africa, Europe, and Western Asia the grave 
was looked upon as a dwelling in which the corpse, lying flexed upon its side, 
continued some sort of existence, and needed food and implements and utensils. 
“ven before the invention of metal tools for working stone, rough slabs of stone 
were sometimes employed for roofing, or lining, or for piling upon graves to 
protect them from the depredations of jackals or other desecrators. But when 
metal tovuls were invented in Egypt, and it became possible to work stone upon 
a large scale, one of the first uses to which the new craft was put was in cutting 
extensive chambers in the rock as dwelling-houses for the dead, and later of 
building temples (of great masses of stone) to which the relatives and friends of 
the deceased could bring their offerings of food. 
Thus, at a time long anterior to the erection of stone buildings or rock-cut 
chambers elsewhere, the Egyptians had built the vastest funerary monuments 
the world has ever seen—the Pyramids of Giza—as gigantic mausolea for the 
reception of the bodies of their rulers, and in association with each pyramid a 
megalithic temple of offerings. 
Is it at all reasonable to suppose that these mighty achievements in Egypt can 
have failed to influence the neighbouring peoples? Must we look upon the sudden 
change of burial customs that occurred shortly afterwards—i.e., at the dawn of 
the Age of Metals—in neighbouring Mediterranean lands, and the institution of 
megalithic building and rock-cut chambers as independent evolutions of custom, 
wholly unrelated to the great events in Egypt? Must we look upon the change 
in the position of the corpse, which is associated in Egypt with the culmination 
of the Pyramid Age, and in other Mediterranean lands with the introduction of 
the rock-cut chamber and the megalithic temple, as being a mere coincidence? 
Ts the essential identity of plan of the Egyptian pyramid and, for instance, the 
New Grange monument in Ireland, as well as many other Early Bronze Age 
buildings in Western Europe, due to the independent evolutions of ideas among 
different peoples? Is it a mere coincidence that the dolmen idea, starting from 
the Eastern Mediterranean littoral, should have manifested itself at a series of 
spots west to the British Isles and east to the Pacific Isles, in regular and 
orderly chronological sequence along coast-lines? Is this the way the independent 
evolution of the same idea, with such a manifest suspicion of inter-tribal and 
inter-racial collusion, works out in practice? If so, why do not the dwellers in 
the midst of continents receive their share of the inspiration? Why should the 
Japanese and Koreans wait for their idea until Malaysia, Burma, and India 
liave got it, and why did it not occur to the peoples of the latter regions to build 
megalithic monuments until Egypt and Syria had built theirs? Is it credible 
