of Yatesbury,[1] are that it is 130 feet in height, 552 feet in diameter, and 1657 feet in circumference; that the flat top is 104 feet or 102 feet across,[2] according to the direction in which it is measured; this last being another Roman coincidence, as the top has no doubt both sunk and spread. The angle of the slope of the sides is 30 degrees to the horizon.
In the year 1777 a shaft was sunk from the top of the mound to the base, by order of the then Duke of Northumberland and Colonel Drax, but no record has been preserved of what they found, or rather did not find, for had they made any discovery of the least importance, it certainly would have been communicated to some of the learned societies of the day. Subsequently, in 1840, a shaft was driven nearly horizontally from the southern face on the level of the original soil to the centre, where it met the Duke's shaft; and subsequently a circular gallery was carried round the centre, but in vain; nothing was found in these excavations that would show that the mound had ever been used for sepulchral purposes, or that threw any light whatever on its history or destination.[3]
Judging from the analogies gathered from our knowledge of the parallel Indian series, we ought not to be surprised if this really were the only result. From the accounts of the Chinese travellers who visited India in the fifth and seventh centuries, we learn that about one-half of the topes they saw and described were erected to commemorate events, and not to contain relics, or as simulated tombs. Wherever Buddha or any of his followers performed any miracles, or where any event happened of sufficient importance to make it desirable that the memory of the locality where it happened should be preserved, there a Tope was erected. To take an example as bearing more directly than usual on our present subject. When Dutthagamini, king of Ceylon (161 B.C.),
- ↑ 'Journal Wiltshire Archæol. and Nat. Hist. Society,' vii. p. 1861.
- ↑ Curiously enough these dimensions are almost identical with those of the mound erected by the Belg'e-Dutch, to commemorate the part they did not take in the battle of Waterloo. Its dimensions ore 130 feet high, 544 feet in diameter, and 1632 feet in circumference. The angle of the slope of the sides is lower, being 2712 degrees, owing to the smaller diameter of the flat top, which is only 40 feet.
- ↑ Douglas, 'Nenia Brit.' p. 161. See also Salisbury volume of the Archæological Institute, p. 74.
