Hello friend, can you make me a summary of Stonehenge?
This is the text:
Scientific archaeology dividies the building of Stonehenge into five or six phases.
What we now see in merely the end-product – the point where the work stopped.
The majority of these rare blue stones come from only one place: a small area in the exrteme south-west tip of Wales.
The blue stone clearly possessed a potent symbolic or “holy” value for prehistoric man.
The main attraction of the stone was certainly its colour.
The Beaker people, the first Bronze Age people in Britain, were sky-worshippers, and we also know blue was an important colour for an eventually succeding culture, the Celtic.
The Celts tattooed and painted themselves with the indigo-hued dye of wood, a plant they introduced to Britain for the Purpose.
The very word “British” means “the (blue-)painted Celts”.
To a modern eye, blue stone looks more dark grey, maybe as an effect of weathering.
Almost certainly each stone, which weighs up to five tons, required a team of at least sixteen men per ton to be shifted on land.
But almost every visitor wants to ask the same question.
What was Stonehenge for?
We can obviously grant it a religious and ritual function; the astroarchaeologists would grant it an observatory one.
It may have served more secular purposes such as lawgiving and judging; as a truce-ground in inter-tribal disputes; and perhaps even as some sort of annual market-place.
The one mistake to avoid is to suppose that one function, or set of function, must have reigend throughout since we know Stonehenge was “active” for at least 1,700 years.
There is on other possible purpose, and this is that from the beginning it was intented to catch the attention of eyes above.
The degree to which primitive men personified – made things into persons – is beyond our imagining today.
Even the stones as Stonehenge would have had “souls”; and we may conclude that the sun and the moon were granted even more anthropomorphic being.
Science, homewer, cannot explain the total experience of Stonehenge, a place that manages to speak a universal language.
It is the openness of the Stonehenge that is no remarkable: it is a ring not merely of doors, but of open doors.
It invities entry, it does not rebuff the outsider.
Another clue to the secret of Stonehenge lies in the tremendous extra effort involved in raising and morticing fast these 7-ton lintels.
This seems incontrovertible evidence of a determination to build for all time; to make sure the vertical stones will never lean of fall.
The lintel-stones not only defy gravity literally, the defy the gravity if natural oblivion.
The were indeed the greatest puzzle for all the early observers of Stonehenge who could explain their erection only by magic.
Stonehenge is not simply a momorial to its Bronze Age buildiers; it is a memorial to a dream, and a dream still dreamt by each.
Something of me shall survive.
Please, I need by tonight !!
10 POINTS TO BEST!
Niko