Angličtina - Stonehenge (2006)
Autor: Jana Strnadová
Stonehenge is surely Britain‘s greatest national icon (aikon), symbolizing mystery, power and endurance. Eight miles north of Salisbury Plain is a large circle of stones, which is called Stonehenge. (In The Salisbury Cathedral, there is deposit the original copy of Magna Charta, king John, 1214) Nobody knows why it was built or what it was used for. Some materials suppose it was an ancient cemetery because of many graves finding around the monument. Others mean it could be a kind of observatory, where astronomers studied the stars and the planets. Another possibility is that it was a place where witches and magicians offered human sacrifices to the gods. Or it was a temple, where the ancients Britons worshipped the Sun. This possibility is based on fact that the sun rises exactly over a certain stone on the outside of the circle and shines onto the altar in the centre of it at dawn on Midsummer s Day. But nobody knows the real purpose of the monument.
Work on Stonehenge started around 1800 BC, but the monument, whose ruins you can see today, was built four hundred years later, around 1400 BC.
The ruins stand in the centre of a huge circle in diameter. The circle is formed by a bank and a ditch. There is also a gap in the north-east side. The ruins consist of two stone circles and two stone horseshoes. These stones were joined with a continuous line of stones, which lies on the top of the uprights. But the most of these have fallen down. The outer horseshoe consists of five trilithons. (“Trilithon” is a Greek word, which means three stones.) In the centre of the horseshoe, there is a large stone called the Altar Stone.
The construction of Stonehenge is even more impressive when we awake to fact with which possibilities and instruments it was created. All of applied instruments were made up by stone, wood and bone. The work on fracture, transport and mounting of stones was so large that the constructers had to be very inventive and knew how to lead big amount of people. They utilized (ju:tilaizd) a mechanism of lever. (li:vr – páka)
The stones were built by the several generations of Druids. A lot of the original stones have been taken by our ancestors to build their houses and roads. Also, a lot of stones have been chipped away by visitors and taken away as souvenirs over the past couple of hundred years. So it s very difficult or nearly impossible to find the rest of stones. But the artefacts found at Stonehenge can be viewed at the London Museum and Salisbury Museum.
Stonehenge and Avebury were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1986 for their outstanding prehistoric monuments.
There are some theories about its name – Stonehenge. In first of them, the word “stone” mean really stone and “henge” is form of English word “hang” (viset). In Anglo-Saxon, it means stone place of sacrifice and in publication dates from 12th century, it is a circle of giants. (džaint - obr)
