The first monumental architecture: rings, rows and chambers of great stones, raised by farming communities without metal tools or writing, and often aligned on the movements of the sun.
Long before cities, people built to gather and to remember. At Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, around 9500 BC, hunter-gatherers set up rings of carved T-shaped limestone pillars several metres high, the oldest known monumental structures. In Atlantic Europe from the fifth millennium BC farming communities raised megaliths (Greek, “great stones”): single standing stones, long avenues of them as at Carnac in Brittany, stone circles, and chambered tombs of upright slabs roofed with capstones and buried under mounds.
The techniques were simple and the labour immense. Stones were quarried by splitting along natural fissures, dragged on sledges over timber tracks, levered upright into prepared pits and packed round with rubble. Where a chamber had to be wider than any single capstone, builders corbelled: at Newgrange in Ireland (c. 3200 BC) and Maeshowe in Orkney (c. 2800 BC) the chambers are roofed by courses of flat slabs, each stepping inward over the one below, a technique that would reappear at Mycenae two thousand years later.
Stonehenge in Wiltshire is the most architectural of the megaliths. It began around 3000 BC as a circular ditch and bank; around 2500 BC the builders set up a ring of thirty sarsen uprights carrying a continuous ring of lintels, and inside it a horseshoe of five great trilithons rising towards the south-west. The stones were dressed, the lintels curved to the circle and jointed to the uprights with mortises and tenons, as if the builders were translating a timber structure into stone. The smaller bluestones were brought from the Preseli Hills of Wales, some 240 km away.
Many of these monuments are aligned on the sun. The axis of Stonehenge points to the midsummer sunrise and, in the other direction, to the midwinter sunset; the passage of Newgrange admits the midwinter sunrise to its chamber through a slot over the door. Architecture here is a calendar and a meeting place for the living and the dead, a shape imposed on the landscape and on the year.
The megalithic builders left no writing, so everything we know of their intentions is read from the stones and what was buried with them. Yet they established the two elementary ways of spanning space (the lintel laid across two posts and the corbel stepping out over a void) on which the architecture of the next two thousand years would be built.