THE MAGIC FIELD OF GLOZEL

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 189, 12 May 1928, Page 24

THE MAGIC FIELD OF GLOZEL

(Arno Dosch-Flcurot, in “The Sphere.”)

At Glozel, a tiny village among the hills which drain into the rivulet Slchon, near Ferrieres, about thirty miles from Vichy, in Central France, there has been a prehistoric discovery which archaeologists are disputing hotly. One group claims it dates from the neolithic age, ten to thirteen thousand years ago, and others place it in the late occupation of Gaul by the Romans, about sixteen hundred years ago.

It seems to belong to both. Beside reindeer-bone fish hooks, Hint spearheads, and clay images, lie tablets in Phoenician characters. Votive offerings of extreme antiquity have been dug up in the same prehistoric stratum with what appears to be the mystic paraphernalia of Gallo-Roman sorcerers. No metal instruments which could fill this archaeological gap has been discovered.

Its tablets are declared by Glozel enthusiasts to be man’s earliest-known writings. The scoffers decipher from them incantations, with references to Egyptian gods and goddesses, whose cult spread under the Romans to the whole Mediterranean.

The Portuguese prehistorian, Professor Mendes-Correa, of the University of Porto, and the. Roumanian neolithic authority, Professor Tafrali, of the University of Jassy, declare it a burial plot from the Stone Age, more specifically from the oldest neolithic period, bordering on the palaeolithic. They are supported by Dr. Salomon Reinach, curator of the important French prehistoric museum at St. Germain-en-Laye; but Reinach’s chief expert, Dr. Camille Jullian, reads from the tablets the droning incantations of a pagan sorcerer of the GalloRoman period. He accounts for the impressive collection of articles from the Stone Age as the collection the sorcerer had made to impress the simple shepherds.. Dr. Jullian rejoices in what he considers the most important “Magic Field” yet discovered, and, to prove it, points to the tablets as the magician’s books, and to the spring beside the excavated fieldsorcerers having frequently established themselves beside' springs. But he cannot explain how his sorcerer gathered up nothing but neolithic articles in his museum for impressing simpletons, and why there were no brouze or other metals.

That is easily explained, according to M. Rene Dussaud, assistant curator of The Louvre. It is either a fraud, or the work of a practical joker, he said, in a paper he read before the Academic des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Faris. If it is not all faked, he argued, someone in a recent generation must have buried the confusing collection of antiquities, entertaining himself with the thought of how he was going to mystify posterity. But, said M. Dussaud. if this is the case, he left a key to his joke so posterity might enjoy it, too. Engraved on one of the bricks at the end of an inscription is a line which has a strong resemblance to the letters, G-L-O-Z-E-L. Cunning men in the Stone Age, said M. Dussaud sarcastically, who foresaw what the name of the modern hamlet was going to be! But M. Dussaud stands alone, lhe other achaeologists believe Glozel to be authentic. They differ only as to the period. They consider Glozel an excavation, which may oblige them to remake completely the picture of prehistory. It raises the question whether modern culture started in Asia, gradually civilising Europe through the ages (the generally accepted theory;, or whether Europe did not have its own prehistory, equal, if not superior, to Asia’s. The palaeolithic authorities are, of course, quite prepared to remake prehistory this side of ten thousand years ago, but the Phoenician school of prehistorians are not eager to disturb the conception they have of the first fifty or sixty centuries before Christ. That may account in part for Professor MendesCorrea, with his neolithic erudition, insisting that Glozel dates from the Stone Age, while Dr. Camille Jullian, one of the leaders of the Phoenician school, sees in it the kitchen of a Gallo-Roman magician. It may be that neither is right, and the Glozel excavations reveal an age in prehistory which has never found a place in the scheme of the past according to the archaeologists. The discoverer of the “MagTg Field,” a

1 young farmer, Emile Fradin, and his friend and protector, Dr. Morlet, of Vichy, take it for granted they have added a new age to the history of man, the “Glozelian” period. The scoffers have thus become “anti-Glozelians,” and the dispute between the two has reached a point where even the International Institute of Anthropology meeting in Amsterdam this September, was disturbed in its work because Glozel was brought to the fore. For there are fossilated portions of bones also in the diggings which have required the judgment of anthropologists. Count Begouen, the eminent prehistorian of Toulouse, and the Abbe Breuil, a savant in anthoropology, took this occasion to attack Professor Mendes-Correa, who was present, for a reference he made to the excavations at Glozeb as neolithic. Professor Mendes-Correa supported his thesis warmly, and to prevent an undignified altercation, neutral anthropologists voted a resolution for the appointment of an international committee to investigate Glozel. This-has led to an official Act by the French Government, making of Glozel an historical monument, which means, in effect, that the excavations will receive a slow, but thorough examination.

The “Magic Field” had lain fallow for a long time. ; No one now living about Glozel Remembers it other than as a pasture along the brook that starts with the spring and whispers its way through this remote corner of the Bourbonnais region. The Fradins bought it in 1924, and on March 1 of that year Grandfather Fradin was holding the handles of the plough, breaking the virgin soil, and the lad Emile was urging on the bullocks when the plough struck a stone that would not give. The two examined to see if it were a bed-rock surface-cropping, and revealed the corner of an oblong stone structure lying just below the grass roots in the subsoil, but above the prehistoric loam. Uncovered, it proved to be glazed within, as if by someone who knew the process of making glass. This made the amateur archaeologists of the neighbourhood, who examined it, declare it to be indisputably post-Phoenician, though later investigations might have been caused by the burning of some funeral offerings. It was filled with objects, which were unfortunately scattered, so the serious investigation must begin with the excavations begun in 1925 by Dr. Morlet. He opened two “tombs,” in which were found the objects which have created the dispute. They were reindeer-bone needles, such as were used in the palaeolithic age, polished bone axes, but such as are found only in the old neolithic period. With them “lamps of clay,” a bone file, and pebbles of odd shapes, some of them perforated, many of them bearing inscriptions. There were vases with friezes, and human masks with curi-ously-rounded eye-holes, often without mouths. In addition, bone fish hooks and spear heads, which looked as if they had been used, and slate spear heads, which evidently had some votive purpose. All these things point to extreme antiquity, but some of the vases, and several dozen tablets are covered with writing, which the people of neither the palaeolithic nor the neolithic ages have ever been known to make. Archaeologists familiar with hieroglyphics read them in some cases apparently quite easily, and others cannot be read at all. Also they get different meanings from them. The writing is also partly by signs, partly by pictures. Scraped on bricks are pictures of dead deer or reindeer. A lump of ochre, which had evidently been used to paint the body lying among the objects seems to point to a period when Europeans coloured their skins. The tablets and the writings on the vases and pebbles seem of comparatively recent date, except to the “Glozelians, who now assume that writing was invented by ‘ a civilisation in- Europe shortly after the Stone Age—the Glozelian age, as they term it. Dr. Julian, having only photographs of the bricks in his possession, got a meaning from them without difficulty. He said they all had to do with the hocus-pocus of sorcery. He read one to say that the local genius of the spring, Tychon. to whom the celebrated demon, Seth, known to sorcery, refuses the offerings made to him, where-