umber of menhirs.

The earliest burials in Japan are marked by simple mounds of earth. It
was not until the beginning of the iron age that megalithic tombs came
into use. The true dolmen is not found in Japan, and all the known
graves are corridor-tombs covered with a mound. They are of four types.
First, we have a simple corridor with no separate chamber; secondly, a
corridor broadening out at one side near the end; thirdly, a true
chamber with a corridor of access; and fourthly, a type in which the
corridor is preceded by an antechamber. All four types occur in rough
unworked stone, roofed with huge slabs, but a few examples of the third
type are made of well-cut and dressed blocks. The mounds are usually
conical, though some are of a complex form shortly to be described. Some
of these contain stone sarcophagi. The bodies were never cremated, but
the bones are so damaged that it is impossible to say what the most
usual position was. Objects of bronze and iron together with pottery and
ornaments were found in the tombs.

The more important tombs are of a more complicated type. They seem to
have contained the remains of emperors and their families. They consist
each of a circular mound, to which is added on one side another mound of
trapezoidal form. The megalithic tomb-chamber or the sarcophagus which
sometimes replaces it lies in the circular part of the mound. The total
axial length of the basis of the whole mound is in a typical case--that
of Nara (Yamato)--674 feet, the diameter of the round end being 420
feet. The mounds have in most cases terraced sides, and are surrounded
by a moat. In early times it seems to have been the custom to slay or
bury alive the servants of the emperor on his mound, but this was given
up about the beginning of the Christian era.

These imperial double mounds seem to begin about two centuries before
the Christian era, and to continue for five or six centuries after it.
Many of them can be definitely assigned to their owners, and others are
attributed by tradition. Thus a rather small mound at the foot of Mount
Unebi (Yamato) is considered to be the burial place of the Emperor
Jimmu, the founder of the Imperial dynasty, and annual ceremonies are
performed before it.

The Japanese Emperors are still buried in terraced mounds, and in the
group of huge stone blocks which have been placed on the mound of the
Emperor Komei, who died in 1866, we may be tempted to see a survival of
the anci