618 Notes on the Kasia Hills > and People. [No. 152. 



most common kind in the Kasia country is composed of erect, oblong 

 pillars, sometimes almost quite unhewn, in other instances carefully- 

 squared and planted a few feet apart. The number composing one 

 monument is never under three, and runs as high as thirteen ; generally 

 it is odd, but not always so. The highest pillar is in the middle (some- 

 times crowned with a circular disk), and to right and left they gradual- 

 ly diminish. In front of these is what English antiquaries call a 

 cromlech, a large flat stone resting on short rough pillars. These form 

 the ordinary roadside resting place of the weary traveller. The blocks 

 are sometimes of great size. The tallest of a thick cluster of pillars in 

 the market place of Murteng in the Jaintia country, rising through the 

 branches of a huge old tree, measured 27 feet in height above the 

 ground. A flat table stone, or cromlech near the village of Sailankot, 

 elevated five feet from the earth, measured thirty-two feet by fifteen, and 

 two feet in thickness. 



In other instances the monument is a square sarcophagus, composed 

 of four large slabs, resting on their edges and well fitted together, and 

 roofed in by a fifth placed horizontally. In Bell's Circassia, may be 

 seen a drawing of an ancient monument existing in that country, 

 which is an exact representation of a thousand such in the Kasia Hills ; 

 and nearly as exact a description of them, though referring to relics 

 on the eastern bank of Jordan, may be read in Irby and Mangles's 

 Syrian Travels. The sarcophagus is often found in the form of a large 

 slab accurately circular, resting on the heads of many little rough 

 pillars, closely planted together, through whose chinks you may descry 

 certain earthen pots containing the ashes of the family. Belonging 

 to the village of Ringhot, in the valley of Mausmai, deep in the forest, 

 is a great collection of such circular cineraries, so close that one may 

 step from slab to slab for many yards. Rarely, you may see a simple 

 cairn, or a pyramid some twenty feet in height, and sometimes one 

 formed in diminishing stories like the common notion of the Tower of 

 Babel, or like the Pyramid of Saccara in Egypt. But the last is pro- 

 bably rather a burning place, than a monument, or at least a combina- 

 tion of the two. 



The upright pillars are merely cenotaphs, and if the Kasias are asked 

 why their fathers went to such expense in erecting them, the universal 

 answer is, " To preserve their name." Yet to few indeed among the 



