Stonehenge

PREFACE.

IV. A discourse on the hieroglyphic From the Greek for "sacred carvings," referring here to the ancient Egyptian writing system. learning of the ancients, and of the origin of the alphabet of letters. Very many hieroglyphic monuments of the Egyptians are explained, more especially those that relate to their true notions of the persons in the Deity. The time and rise of the alphabet of letters is deduced from a new foundation. The present square Hebrew characters are shown to be the primitive idea of letters, from whence all others are derived. Whence the idea of every letter was taken? an explication of all the old Hebrew coins with Samaritan characters An ancient script closely related to Paleo-Hebrew, used by the Samaritans..

V. The patriarchal history, particularly of Abraham, is largely pursued; and the deduction of the Phoenician colony Stukeley believed that ancient Phoenician traders from the Levant settled in Britain, bringing Eastern wisdom with them. into the Island of Britain, about or soon after his time; whence the origin of the Druids, of their Religion and writing; they brought the patriarchal Religion along with them, and some knowledge of symbols or hieroglyphs, like those of the ancient Egyptians; they had the notion and expectation of the Messiah, and of the time of the year when he was to be born, of his office and death.

VI. Of the Temples of the Druids in Britain, their religious rites, orders, sacrifices, groves, tombs, their ancient tracks original: "cursus's" — refers to large, linear Neolithic earthworks found near monuments like Stonehenge., places of sports and exercises, etc. particularly an ample and accurate description of that stupendous temple of theirs at Abury The modern village of Avebury in Wiltshire, home to the largest stone circle in the world. in North Wiltshire, the most august work at this day upon the globe of the earth; with many prints of ground-plots, views and admeasurements of all its parts; of their manner of sepulture The practice of burial.; an account of my digging into many of their burial mounds original: "barrows and tumuli", with drawings of them, etc.

VII. Of the celebrated Stonehenge, another Temple of theirs, with prints of that work; an account of the burial mounds I dug up, and what was discovered in them; of the knowledge the Druids had of the magnetical compass, and conjectures of the particular times when these works were made, long before Caesar arrived in Britain.

I propose to publish these two first, and proceed to the speculative parts afterwards; reserving them, God willing, to the maturer time of my life.
My intent is (besides preserving the memory of these extraordinary monuments, so much to the honour of our country, now in great danger of ruin) to promote, as much as I am able, the knowledge and practice of ancient and true Religion; to revive in the minds of the learned the spirit of Christianity, nearly as old as the Creation, which is now languishing among us; to restore the first and great Idea of the Deity, who has carried on the same regular and golden chain of Religion from the beginning to this day; to warm our hearts into that true sense of Religion, which keeps the medium between ignorant superstition and learned free-thinking In the 18th century, "free-thinking" was often used as a derogatory term for deism or atheism., between slovenly fanaticism and popish pageantry A common 18th-century Protestant critique of the elaborate rituals of the Roman Catholic Church., between enthusiasm and the rational worship of God, which is nowhere upon earth done, in my judgment, better than in the Church of England. And seeing a spirit of Scepticism has of late become so fashionable and audacious as to strike at the fundamentals of all revelation, I have endeavoured to trace it back to the fountain of Divinity, whence it flows; and show that Religion is one system as old as the world, and that that is the Christian Religion; that God did not leave the rational part of his creation, like the colony of an ant-hill, with no other guide than instinct, but proportioned his discoveries to the age of the world, to the learning, wisdom, and experience of it; as a wise parent does now to his children. I shall show likewise, that our predecessors, the Druids of Britain, though left in the extremest west to the improvement of their own thoughts, yet advanced their inquiries, under all disadvantages, to such heights, as should make our moderns ashamed, to wink in the sunshine of learning and religion. And we may with reason conclude, there was somewhat very extraordinary in those principles, which prompted them to such a noble spirit as produced these works, still visible with us,