Next, I cannot explain how it is possible that I should find things which, to all appearance, must have been used by the uncivilized men of the stone period, but which could not have been made with the rude implements at their disposal. Among these I may specially mention the earthen vessels found in great numbers, without decorations, it is true, and not fine, but which however are of excellent workmanship. Not one of these vessels has been turned upon a potter’s wheel, and yet it appears to me that they could not have been made without the aid of some kind of machine, such as, on the other hand, could not have been produced by the rude stone implements of the period.
I am further surprised to find, in this stone period, and more frequently than ever before, those round articles with a hole in the centre, which have sometimes the form of humming-tops or whorls (_carrouselen_), sometimes of fiery mountains. In the last form they bear, on a small scale, the most striking resemblance to the colossal sepulchral mounds of this district, which latter, both on this account and also because stone implements have been found in one of them (the Chanaï Tépé) belong probably to the stone period, and therefore perhaps to an age thousands of years before the Trojan war.[92] At a depth of 3 meters (about 10 feet), I found one of these objects made of very fine marble: all the rest are made of excellent clay rendered very hard by burning; almost all of them have decorations, which have evidently been scratched into them when the clay was as yet unburnt, and which in very many cases have been filled with a white substance, to make them more striking to the eye. It is probable that at one time the decorations upon all of these objects were filled with that white substance, for upon many of them, where it no longer exists, I see some traces of it. Upon some of the articles of very hard black clay without decorations, some hand has endeavoured to make them after the clay had been burnt, and, when looked at through a magnifying glass, these marks leave no doubt that they have been laboriously scratched with a piece of flint.
The question then forces itself upon us: _For what were these objects used?_ They cannot possibly have been employed in spinning or weaving, or as weights for fishing-nets, for they are too fine and elegant for such purposes; neither have I as yet been able to discover any indication that they could have been used for any handicraft. When, therefore, I consider the perfect likeness of most of these objects to the form of the heroic sepulchral mounds, I am forced to believe that they, as well as those with two holes which occurred only at a depth of 6½ feet, were used as _Ex votos_.