182 W. King —Notice of a pre-historic Burial Place [No. 3, 
These coffin-like hollows are narrow at the opening, but widen out towards 
the bottom. They are not of much size, the largest being 5' 6" long, V 6' 
wide at mouth, and 11 inches deep ; and this smallness probably indicates 
that the bodies were embalmed, more particularly as the cavities would 
seem to have been cut out as they were required, the floor slab having been 
placed when the tomb was built. Another point in favor of the view of 
embalming is, that the cavities are perfectly clean, not stained as they 
might have been in case of rapid decomposition of the corpse. 
The kists arc generally about 6 feet long by 5 feet broad and, with the 
overhanging roof, about 4 feet high ; but some are much larger. The prin¬ 
cipal tomb is 9' 6" long, and 9' wide, the covering slab being IK 8" by 11' 
G", with a thickness at the edge of V 4 n ; the whole height from the ground 
being 5 feet. The circle enclosing this tomb is 37 feet in diameter, the 
stones forming it being some of them 8 feet long. 
Generally, each circle of stones encloses one tomb ; but there are ex¬ 
ceptions, such as two kists within a single circle, and again, four of these 
arranged in a row inside of a long elliptical ring. 
The covering slab and the sides of the kist are each of a single piece 
of sandstone, but many of these are now cracked, and in one instance I 
could not tell whether the upright slab were fractured or that one part of 
it had been cut to fit the other as is often the case in the facing of the great 
stone walls of some of the Telingana fortresses. The small door-way is 
most frequently cut out in the upper half of one of the wall slabs, generally 
at one side or the other, though in a few cases it is in the middle. There 
does not appear to have been any covering stone for the body cavities, 
indeed the raised rim of these would have required a covering with perhaps 
more carving than the builders could elaborate. 
The stone used is in all cases a very coarse grey sandstone, the rock of 
the place itself, but I could not see any trace of quarries though such may 
have been overlooked in my difficult search through such jungle. This use 
of the stone of the neighbourhood is another point of difference between 
these relics and the ordinary Korumbar rings of S. India, the latter being 
usually constructed of stones other than the rock of the immediate locality. 
Further examination of the slopes of the low hills in the neighbourhood 
of Rakshasgudium brought to light other sites of similar assemblages of 
tombs, but these are all very poor in the number and size of the kists, 
while there are no cruciform stones. 
The history of this place of sepulture is of course lost in obscurity, 
but some attempt may be made to give it a place in the archaeological 
record. Col. Glasfurd, as shown in the extract from his report at the be¬ 
ginning of this paper, attributes the remains observed by him in the Goda¬ 
vari valley to a possible Indo-Scythic period, though I think he uses this 
