noun
definition
A dolmen or ancient underground tomb in Wales, usually made with stones disposed in a circular shape.
synonyms
Examples of cromlechs in a Sentence
Monoliths and cromlechs are not uncommon in the neighbourhood.
The question as to whether copper really was first used in Egypt is not yet resolved, and many arguments can be brought against the theory of Egyptian origin and in favour of one in Syria or further north.26 Egypt has also recently been credited with being the inceptor of the whole " megalithic (or heliolithic, as the fashionable word now is) culture " of mankind, from Britain to China and (literally) Peru or at any rate Mexico via the Pacific Isles.27 The theory is that the achievements of the Egyptians in great stone architecture at the time of the pyramid-builders so impressed their contemporaries that they were imitated in the surrounding lands, by the Libyans and Syrians, that the fame of them was carried by the Phoenicians further afield, and that early Arab and Indian traders passed on the megalithic idea to Farther India, and thence to Polynesia and so on so that both the teocalli of Teotihuacan and Stonehenge are ultimately derived through cromlechs and dolmens innumerable from the stone pyramid of Saqqara, built by Imhotep, the architect of King Zoser, about 3100 B.C. (afterwards deified as the patron of science and architecture).
There are antiquarian remains (cromlechs, stone circles and the like) at Slievemore and elsewhere.
And yet in the European Stone age which followed, the age in which the great menhirs and cromlechs were erected, in which the domestication of animals began and the first corn was sown, we find in the strata no image of man or beast, big or little.
The piles of granite rocks somewhat in the shape of cromlechs which are found scattered about this province, and especially along the western edge of the Hondsrug, have long been named Hunebedden, from a popular superstition that they were "Huns' beds."
The " megalithic " monuments of Agia Phaneromeni 1 and Hala Sultan Teke near Larnaca may perhaps be early, like the Palestinian cromlechs; but the vaulted chamber of Agia Katrina near Enkomi seems to be Mycenaean or later; and the perforated monoliths at Ktima seem to belong to oil presses of uncertain but probably not prehistoric date.
Such chambers, denuded of the covering mound, or over which no covering mound has been raised, are popularly known in England as "cromlechs" and in France as "dolmens" (see Stone Monuments).
The only traces left by the primitive populations are the megalithic monuments (dolmens, menhirs and cromlechs), which remain to this day in great numbers (see Stone Monuments).