{"it":{"id":"BRI-006","kind":"site","sub":"British Isles","name":"Knowth","place":"Ireland","lat":53.702,"lon":-6.492,"date":"It comprises a large passage tomb surrounded by 17 smaller tombs, built during the…","mat":"quartz","nfacts":3,"tags":["Britain"],"sum":"Knowth's great mound in Ireland stands about 12 m high and 67 m across, surrounded by 17 smaller tombs. Its kerbstones and passages carry roughly a third of all the megalithic art known in Western Europe.","why":"A Neolithic passage tomb in Ireland with the largest body of megalithic art in Europe, whose meaning is unknown.","src":[334],"nsrc":2,"yt":"Knowth's carvings have no written key. What were they trying to record?","rel":["NEW-NEW"],"hook":"Knowth's tombs hold the largest group of megalithic art in Europe, carved about 3,200 BC."},"S":{"334":["Wikipedia: Knowth","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowth"]},"rec":{"id":"BRI-006","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"The mound is about","a":"height","v":"12","u":"m","o":"The mound is about 12 m high and 67 m in diameter, REF2 covering roughly a hectare.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Knowth&oldid=1373019904","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1373019904 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0986"},{"f":"The mound is about 12 m high and","a":"diameter","v":"67","u":"m","o":"The mound is about 12 m high and 67 m in diameter, REF2 covering roughly a hectare.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Knowth&oldid=1373019904","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1373019904 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0987"},{"f":"The site is","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"9","u":"km","o":"The site is 9 km west of Drogheda.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Knowth&oldid=1373019904","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1373019904 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0988"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"thumb|The western entrance, showing the white quartz left on the ground","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Knowth&oldid=1373019904"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"It comprises a large passage tomb surrounded by 17 smaller tombs, built during the Neolithic era around 3200 BC.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"53.70166667","lon":"-6.49166667","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0005 deg (~0.05 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/264536965"},"src":[{"id":"S0321","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Knowth&oldid=1373019904"},{"id":"S0513","t":"Wikipedia: Knowth","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowth"},{"id":"VBRI-006-3","t":"Brú na Bóinne - Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne - UNESCO World Heritage Centre","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/659/"},{"id":"VBRI-006-4","t":"Launch of ‘The Megalithic Art of the Passage Tombs at Knowth, County Meath’","u":"https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/press-releases/launch-of-the-megalithic-art-of-the-passage-tombs-at-knowth-county-meath/"},{"id":"VBRI-006-5","t":"Brú na Bóinne - World Heritage Ireland","u":"https://www.worldheritageireland.ie/world-heritage-properties/bru-na-boinne/"},{"id":"VBRI-006-6","t":"Phil Stooke: The Knowth 'moon map' (University of Western Ontario)","u":"https://publish.uwo.ca/~pjstooke/knowth.htm"},{"id":"VBRI-006-7","t":"Carrowkeel.com: Megalithic Art at Knowth","u":"http://www.carrowkeel.com/sites/boyne/knowth5.html"}],"sum":"Some of the finest carvings at Knowth were never meant to be seen. At this Irish tomb, archaeologists found spirals, lozenges and wavering serpent lines cut not only on the faces that look out at the world but on the backs, the sides pressed into the mound, where no living eye could follow them once the stones were set. Archaeologists call it hidden art. Perhaps the builders simply reused old stones and turned the decorated side inward. Or perhaps the pictures were not made for people at all.\n\nKnowth stands on a ridge above the River Boyne in County Meath, about 40 kilometres north of Dublin, in a bend of the river known as Brú na Bóinne. It is one of three great prehistoric mounds there, with Newgrange and Dowth, and UNESCO counts some forty smaller satellite tombs around them. Knowth's great mound is about 12 metres high and 67 metres across, covering roughly a hectare, larger than a rugby pitch, and it is surrounded by 17 smaller tombs. Around its foot runs a ring of 127 kerbstones, great slabs laid edge to edge, three of them now missing.\n\nIt is a passage tomb: a mound with stone-lined corridors leading into chambers deep inside. Unusually, Knowth has two, one opening to the east and one to the west, each running independently to its own chamber. The eastern passage ends in a cross-shaped chamber with three recesses, where stone basins once held the cremated remains of the dead; the right-hand recess is the largest and the most richly carved. The western passage ends in a simpler chamber behind a sill stone. Its own stone basin now sits about two-thirds of the way down the passage, stuck where later people abandoned it while trying to drag it out.\n\nThe mound was raised around 3200 BC, about five thousand years ago, by the first farmers of Ireland, people with no metal and no writing. And they carved. Knowth holds the largest concentration of megalithic art anywhere in Europe, more than a third of all the examples known in Western Europe. Excavators recorded over 200 decorated stones. Most of the carving is abstract: spirals, lozenges, serpent-like lines, circles and crescents, worked into the kerbstones and crowded especially around the approaches to the two entrances. UNESCO calls the Boyne complex the largest and most important expression of prehistoric megalithic art in Europe.\n\nUncovering it took most of a lifetime. A brief dig in 1941 barely scratched the site. In 1962 George Eogan of University College Dublin began the first thorough excavation, and he kept digging season after season until 2000. The western passage entrance was found in 1967, the eastern in 1968. Layer after layer revealed a monument with a long afterlife. After the builders were gone, people raised a timber circle near the east entrance and left offerings there. Then the mound slumped, burying both entrances, and for some two thousand years the place lay almost unused. In the late Iron Age and early Christian period it became a fortified hill, ringed with ditches and riddled with underground passages. Someone found the old chambers then: early Christian graffiti marks the stones of the eastern chamber, along with four names in ogham, the early Irish script of notches. Knowth became the seat of the kings of Northern Brega. The Normans used it as a fort in the 12th century, the Cistercian monks of Mellifont farmed it, and in 1939 the state took most of it into care. Medieval Irish lore listed the \"caves of Knowth\" among the three darkest places in Ireland.\n\nEogan died in 2021 at 91. The following year the Royal Irish Academy published the seventh and last volume of his results, devoted to the art. Ireland's heritage department launched it on the summer solstice, a date it noted was likely of great ritual importance to the builders.\n\nEven the mound's face is still argued over. Excavators found a layer of white quartz stones at the entrances, as at Newgrange, where the quartz was rebuilt as a gleaming white wall. Eogan did not believe Neolithic people could have built such a wall without it collapsing, so at Knowth the quartz was left spread on the ground. Other archaeologists, including Robert Hensey and Elizabeth Shee Twohig in 2017, argue that both tombs once had brilliant quartz fronts.\n\nWhat did the carvings mean? The mainstream answer is that they are symbols tied to burial and ritual in a sacred landscape, a visual language whose key is lost. The builders left no writing to explain them, and no one today can read them.\n\nBut some researchers have looked up. The passages run east and west, which suggests an alignment on the equinoxes, the two days a year when the sun rises due east and sets due west. Whether they once caught that light cannot now be shown: later settlers damaged the entrances when they dug their underground passages, a concrete wall was built inside the western entrance after the excavations, and the slow wobbles of the Earth's orbit shift alignments over thousands of years. The American researcher Martin Brennan spent years on the question. In 1980 he watched the setting sun shine into the western passage on 13 September. In his 1983 book The Stars and the Stones he read Kerbstone 52, ringed with crescents and circles, as a calendar of the moon's phases.\n\nThen, in 1994, Philip Stooke, a planetary mapper at the University of Western Ontario, published a bolder reading in the Journal for the History of Astronomy. Orthostat 47, the upright stone at the end of the eastern passage, carries a design that he believes is a map of the dark patches on the face of the full moon, the seas that every naked eye can see. He counts at least a dozen points of match with a naked-eye map of the moon. The stone bears three similar designs set at different angles, and Stooke reads them as the moon's apparent turning across the night sky. If he is right, it is the oldest known map of the moon, cut nearly five thousand years before any telescope.\n\nBoth readings are hard to test. A circle or an arc can be a moon, a sun, an eye or simply a pleasing shape, and anyone who looks for a match can find one. The stones will not settle it.\n\nYet the questions do not go away. A people without writing raised a mound that has outlasted kings, monks and Norman soldiers, aligned its two passages on an axis that the sun favours twice a year, carved more of the stone art of Western Europe than anywhere else, and hid some of their finest work where only the dead and the dark would ever see it. Who were they carving for, and what did they see when they looked up at the moon?","qs":["Knowth's carvings have no written key. What were they trying to record?","Excavations ran from 1962 to 2000. Why can digging a single site take decades?","Brennan saw a lunar calendar; Stooke saw a map of the moon. How could either claim be tested?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/County_Meath_-_Knowth_-_20210930145613.jpg/1280px-County_Meath_-_Knowth_-_20210930145613.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:County_Meath_-_Knowth_-_20210930145613.jpg","title":"County Meath - Knowth - 20210930145613.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Markiemcg1","cap":"County Meath, Knowth."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/181_Knowth%2C_Coutny_Meath.jpg/1280px-181_Knowth%2C_Coutny_Meath.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:181_Knowth,_Coutny_Meath.jpg","title":"181 Knowth, Coutny Meath.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"XeresNelro","cap":"Ireland"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/11/Detail_of_the_neolithic_art_at_Knowth.jpg/1280px-Detail_of_the_neolithic_art_at_Knowth.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detail_of_the_neolithic_art_at_Knowth.jpg","title":"Detail of the neolithic art at Knowth.jpg","lic":"CC BY 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0","by":"jemartin03","cap":"Knowth"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Dowth_Passage_Tomb_3.JPG/1280px-Dowth_Passage_Tomb_3.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dowth_Passage_Tomb_3.JPG","title":"Dowth Passage Tomb 3.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Raemond Carolan","cap":"Knowth Passage Tomb Cemetery"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Knowth03.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Knowth03.jpg","title":"Knowth03.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Sitomon","cap":"Yacimiento arqueológico de Knowth"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"200+","u":"carved","h":"Over a third of all megalithic art in Western Europe is at Knowth","s":[84]},{"v":"Quartz","h":"Made of","s":[84]}],"hs":{"84":["Wikipedia: Knowth (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowth"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/BRI-006.webp","w":1280,"h":1600,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/County_Meath_-_Knowth_-_20210930145613.jpg/1280px-County_Meath_-_Knowth_-_20210930145613.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}