The neighbouring island of Corsica also contains important megalithic remains.  They consist of thirteen dolmens, forty-one menhirs, two alignements, and a cromlech.  They fall geographically into two groups, one in the extreme north and the other in the extreme south of the island.

The stones used are chiefly granite and gneiss.  The dolmens, which are of carefully chosen flat blocks showing no trace of work, are all rectangular in plan, and usually consist of four side-walls and a cover-slab.  The finest of all, however, the dolmen of Fontanaccia, has seven blocks supporting the cover, one at each short end, three in one of the long sides, and two in the other.  None of the dolmens are covered by mounds.

Of the alignements, that of Caouria seems to consist, in part at least, of two parallel lines of menhirs, the rest of the plan being uncertain.  There are still thirty-two blocks, of which six have fallen.  The other alignement, that of Rinaiou, consists of seven menhirs set in a straight line.  The cromlech is circular and stands on Cape Corse.

On the small island of Pianosa, near Elba, are several rock-hewn tombs of the aeneolithic period which ought perhaps to be classed with the megalithic monuments of Sardinia and Corsica.

CHAPTER VII

AFRICA, MALTA, AND THE SMALLER
MEDITERRANEAN ISLANDS

North Africa is a great stronghold of the megalithic civilization, indeed it is thought by some that it is the area in which megalithic building originated.  Morocco, Tunis, Algeria, and Tripoli all abound in dolmens and other monuments.  Even in the Nile Valley they occur, for what looks like a dolmen surrounded by a circle was discovered by de Morgan in the desert near Edfu, and Wilson and Felkin describe a number of simple dolmens which exist near Lado in the Sudan.  Tripoli remains as yet comparatively unexplored.  The traveller Barth speaks of stone circles near Mourzouk and near the town of Tripoli.  The great trilithons (senams) with holes pierced in their uprights and ‘altar tables’ at their base, which Barth, followed by Cooper in his Hill of the Graces, described as megalithic monuments, have been shown to be nothing more than olive-presses, the ‘altar tables’ being the slabs over which the oil ran off as it descended.  True dolmens do, however, occur in Tripoli, and Cooper figures a fine monument at Messa in the Cyrenaica, which appears to consist of a single straight line of tall uprights with a continuous entablature of blocks similar to that of the outer circle at Stonehenge.