Egypt has helped to fix the chronology of prehistoric Krete: I am now able to show that it can perform the same service for Britain. Hitherto there has been no possibility of determining the period when Stonehenge was built; the attempt to do so astronomically, at all events, has not secured the suffrages of the archaeologist. And there seemed no other means whereby its age could be fixed.

That it belongs to the beginning of the Bronze Age, however, has long been fairly clear. A stone with a copper stain was found by Dr Gowland during the excavations at Stonehenge in 1901. and chippings from the sarsen blocks of the outer circle have been discovered in at least two of the adjoining Bronze Age barrows. We may therefore, conclude that the blocks were erected at no great interval of time before the construction of the barrow.

Most of the objects found in the barrows have been deposited in the Museum at Devizes. Among them are numerous beads described as “notched beads of blue glass. What was my surprise to find that they were neither notched nor of glass, but were well-known Egyptian beads of Egyptian faience and coated with Egyptian blue glaze. They are beads, moreover, which belong to one particular period in Egyptian history, the latter part of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the earlier part of the Nineteenth Dynasty, and are known to Egyptian archaeologists as cylindrical beads formed of circular disks. There is a large number of them in the Devizes Museum, as they are met with plentifully in the Early Bronze Age tumuli of Wiltshire in association with amber beads and barrel shaped beads of jet or lignite (Plate III). Three of them come from Stonehenge itself (Barrow 39). Similar beads of “ivory have been found in a Bronze Age cist near Warminster: if the material is really ivory it must have been derived from the East. The cylindrical faience beads, it may be added, have been discovered in Dorsetshire as well as in Wiltshire.

The period to which they belong may be dated B.C. 1450-1250, and as we must allow some time for their passage across the trade-routes to Wiltshire an approximate date for their presence in the British barrows will be B.C. 1300. Consequently Stonehenge will have been erected in the 14^th century before our era.

In one of the barrows two other Egyptian beads have been discovered. These are the ribbed and melon-shaped beads characteristic of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, thus agreeing with the evidence if the cylindrical beads.

Along that particular trade route these Egyptian beads made their way to southern Britain is of curse uncertain. Speaking as a geologist, Prof Boyd Dawkins maintains that the blue stones which form the inner circle at Stonehenge have been brought from Brittany and not from Wales, as is usually supposed. It will be remembered that, in the time of Caesar, the Veneti of Brittany had a large commercial as well as naval fleet, with which they carried on trade with the opposite coast of Britain. But there was a prehistoric trade route in amber which ran from the Baltic to the Adriatic through the valleys of the Elbe and Danube, and which Montelius has shown goes back to the late Neolithic epoch, while amber was carried at an early date from the Baltic to Britain and the gold of Ireland and Wales was conveyed to Scandinavia.

AH Sayce

Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol I, 1914

Beads from the bronze Age barrows on Salisbury Plain, in the Wiltshire Archaeological Society’s Museum at Devizes The necklace of 32 beads is form Barrow 6, at Upton Lovell; the large central bead and the small round ones are of amber; the fusiform, or olive shaped ones are of jet; the two terminal rings of Kimmeridge Shale, and the long segmented, or notched beads are of an opaque blue substance, that has been variously described as ‘vitreous paste’ or ‘faience’. The single long bead in the centre is of this last description, and was found in a barrow at Lake, near Stonehenge.

EGYPTIAN BEADS IN BRITAIN

Professor Sayce, in the foregoing article, has noted the occurrence in the Salisbury  Plain district of interments containing XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasty Egyptian beads, and from that fact has drawn most interesting conclusions as to the date of the Plain barrows and the great Stonehenge temple. These conclusions bear out the date usually, I think, accepted for Stonehenge, which ascribes its building to about 1400 BC in the Middle bronze Age.

My own interest in the matter is due to the fact that in the course of the excavations of the Fund at Deir el-Bahari, we discovered thousands of blue glaze beads of the exact particular type (already well known from other Egyptian diggings) of these found in Britain. Ours are, in all probability, mostly of the time of Hatshepsut, and so date to about 1500 BC. In the third volume of The XIth Temple at Deir el-Bahari (Thirty Second Memoir of the EEF), which has lately appeared, I noted (P17) the identity of our Deir el-Bahari beads with those that have been found in Britain. Professor Sayce tells me that he had note noted my reference to the matter when he penned his article. It is gratifying that the Professor agrees that the Devizes beads are undoubtedly Egyptian, as an important voice is thereby added to the Consensus of opinion on the subject.

What I said in Deir el-Bahari: XIth Dynasty, III. Was: “long segmental beads occur, of an interesting type, identical with similar ‘faience’ or ‘frit’ beads found in deposits of the Middle Bronze Age in Crete and in Western Europe, even so far as Britain, as for example at Lake and Tan Hill in Wiltshire. There can be little doubt that the blue segmental beads from Lake and Tan Hill are of Egyptian make , and so date at the earliest to about 1500 BC. They are found in Egypt as late as about 1200 BC probably. That they were imported into Britain long after the period 1500 – 1200 BC, is hardly likely.” Their occurrence in Britain is a testimony to the long distances that highly prized objects were carried in the course of trade and barter so early as about 1400 BC. Up the Rhone valley and across Gaul came these little beads, which, we can well imagine, were greatly valued by our ancient chieftains for their brilliant colour – a quality we still admire. We are not here dealing with imitations: these are actual Egyptian beads.

The Wiltshire finds, and others of the same kind in Britain have been mentioned or described in the following publications:

Brit. Mus. Guide: Antiquities of the Bronze Age, P96;
A.J. Evans, Proc. Soc. Antiq. XXII. (1908), P127;
Ludovic Mann, Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot. XL. 1906, pp.398 ff.;
Abercromby, Journ. Anthrop. Inst XXV. (1905), pp.256 ff.:
Bronze Age Pottery of Great Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 1912), p.66.

I am indebted to my colleague Mr Reginald smith for several of these references.

H.R. Hall

Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Volume 1, 1914. p19