The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 03

by Unknown

CHAPTER II. THE MYCENÆAN AGE

At Mycenæ in 1876 Dr. Schliemann lifted the corner of the veil which had so long enshrouded the elder age of Hellas. Year by year ever since that veil has been further withdrawn, and now we are privileged to gaze on more than the shadowy outline of a far-back age. The picture is still incomplete, but it is already possible to trace the salient features.… The name “Mycenæan” is now applied to a whole class of monuments—buildings, sepulchres, ornaments, weapons, pottery, engraved stones—which resemble more or less closely those found at Mycenæ. I think I am right when I say that archæologists are unanimous in considering them the outcome of one and the same civilisation, and the product of one and the same race.—William Ridgeway.

MYCENÆAN CIVILISATION[3]

“Mycenæan” is a convenient epithet for a certain phase of a prehistoric civilisation, which, as a whole, is often called “Ægean.” It owes its vogue to the fame of Henry Schliemann’s[c] discovery at Mycenæ in 1876, but is not intended to beg the open question as to the origin or principal seat of the Bronze Age culture of the Greek lands.

The Gate of the Lions, Mycenæ

The site of Mycenæ itself was notorious for the singular and massive character of its ruins, long before Schliemann’s time. The great curtain wall and towers of the citadel, of mixed Cyclopean, polygonal, and ashlar construction, and unbroken except on the south cliff, and the main gate, crowned with a heraldic relief of lionesses, have never been hidden; and though much blocked with their own ruin, the larger dome-tombs outside the citadel have always been visible, and remarked by travellers. But since these remains were always referred vaguely to a “Heroic” or “proto-Hellenic” period, even Schliemann’s preliminary clearing of the gateway and two dome-tombs in 1876, which exposed the engaged columns of the façades, and suggested certain inferences as to external revetment and internal decoration, would not by itself have led any one to associate Mycenæ with an individual civilisation. It was his simultaneous attack on the unsearched area which was enclosed by the citadel walls, and in 1876 showed no remains above ground, that led to the recognition of a “Mycenæan civilisation.” Schliemann had published in 1868 his belief that the Heroic graves mentioned by Pausanias lay within the citadel of Mycenæ, and now he chose the deeply silted space just within the gate for his first sounding. About 10 feet below the surface his diggers exposed a double ring of upright slabs, once capped with cross slabs, and nearly 90 feet in diameter. Continuing downwards through earth full of sherds and other débris, whose singularity was not then recognised, the men found several sculptured limestone slabs showing subjects of war or the chase, and scroll and spiral ornament rudely treated in relief. When, after some delay, the work was resumed, some skeletons were uncovered lying loose, and at last, 30 feet from the original surface, an oblong pit-grave was found, paved with pebbles, and once roofed, which contained three female skeletons, according to Schliemann, “smothered in jewels.” A few feet to the west were presently revealed a circular altar, and beneath it another grave with five corpses, two probably female, and an even richer treasure of gold. Three more pits came to light to the northward, each adding its quota to the hoard, and then Schliemann, proclaiming that he had found Atreus and all his house, departed for Athens. But his Greek ephor, clearing out the rest of the precinct, came on yet another grave and some gold objects lying loose. Altogether there were nineteen corpses in six pits, buried, as the grave furniture showed, at different times, but all eventually included in a holy ring.

[ca. 1600-1000 B.C.]

These sepulchres were richer in gold than any found elsewhere in the world, a fact which led to an absurd attempt to establish their kinship with the later and only less golden burials of Scythians or Celts. The metal was worked up into heavy death-masks and lighter breastplates, diadems, baldrics, pendants, and armlets, often made of mere foil, and also into goblets, hairpins, engraved with combats of men and beasts, miniature balances, and an immense number of thin circular plaques and buttons with bone, clay, or wooden cores. Special mention is due to the inlays of gold and niello on bronze dagger-blades, showing spiral ornament or scenes of the chase, Egyptian in motive, but non-Egyptian in style; and to little flat models of shrine-façades analogous to those devoted to Semitic pillar-worship. The ornament on these objects displayed a highly developed spiraliform system, and advanced adaptation of organic forms, especially octopods and butterflies, to decorative uses. The shrines, certain silhouette figurines, and one cup bear moulded doves, and plant forms appear inlaid in a silver vessel. The last-named metal was much rarer than gold, and used only in a few conspicuous objects, notably a great hollow ox-head with gilded horns and frontal rosette, a roughly modelled stag, and a cup, of which only small part remains, chased with a scene of nude warriors attacking a fort. Bronze swords and daggers and many great cauldrons were found, with arrow-heads of obsidian, and also a few stone vases, beads of amber, intaglio gems, sceptre heads of crystal, certain fittings and other fragments made of porcelain and paste, and remains of carved wood. Along with this went much pottery, mostly broken by the collapse of the roofs. It begins with a dull painted ware, which we now know as late “proto-Mycenæan”; and it develops into a highly glazed fabric, decorated with spiraliform and marine schemes in lustrous paint, and showing the typical forms, false-mouthed amphoræ and long-footed vases, now known as essentially Mycenæan. The loose objects found outside the circle include the best intaglio ring from this site, admirably engraved with a cult scene, in which women clad in flounced skirts are chiefly concerned, and the worship seems to be of a sacred tree.

This treasure as a whole was admitted at once to be far too highly developed in technique and ornament, and too individual in character, to belong, as the lionesses over the gate used to be said to belong, merely to a first stage in Hellenic art. It preceded in time the classical culture of the same area; but, whether foreign or native, it was allowed to represent a civilisation that was at its acme and practically incapable of further development. So the bare fact of a great prehistoric art-production, not strictly Greek, in Greece came to be accepted without much difficulty. But before describing how its true relations were unfolded thereafter, it may be mentioned that the site of Mycenæ had yet much to reveal after Schliemann left it. Ten years later the Greek Archæological Society resumed exploration there, and M. Tsountas, probing the summit of the citadel, hit upon and opened out a fragment of a palace with hearth of stucco, painted with geometric design, and walls adorned with frescoes of figure subjects, armed men, and horses. An early Doric temple was found to have been built over this palace, a circumstance which disposed forever of the later dates proposed for Mycenæan objects. Subsequently many lesser structures were cleared in the east and southwest of the citadel area, which yielded commoner vessels of domestic use, in pottery, stone, and bronze, and some more painted objects, including a remarkable fragment of stucco, which shows human ass-headed figures in procession, a tattooed head, and a plaque apparently showing the worship of an aniconic deity. From the immense variety of these domestic objects more perhaps has been learned as to the affinities of Mycenæan civilisation than from the citadel graves. Lastly, a most important discovery was made of a cemetery west of the citadel. Its tombs are mostly rock-cut chambers, approached by sloping dromoi; but there are also pits, from one of which came a remarkable ivory mirror handle of oriental design. The chamber graves were found to be rich in trinkets of gold, engraved stones, usually opaque, vases in pottery and stone, bronze mirrors and weapons, terra-cottas and carved ivory; but neither they nor the houses have yielded iron except in very small quantity, and that not fashioned into articles of utility. The presence of fibulæ and razors supplied fresh evidence as to Mycenæan fashions of dress and wearing of the hair, and a silver bowl, with male profiles inlaid in gold, proved that the upper lip was sometimes shaved. All the great dome-tombs known have been cleared, but the process has added only to our architectural knowledge. The tomb furniture had been rifled long ago. Part of the circuit of a lower town has been traced, and narrow embanked roadways conducted over streams on Cyclopean bridges lead to it from various quarters.

The abundance and magnificence of the circle treasure had been needed to rivet the attention and convince the judgment of scholars, slow to reconstruct ex pede Herculem. But there had been a good deal of evidence available previous to 1876, which, had it been collated and seriously studied, might have greatly discounted the sensation that the Citadel graves eventually made. Although it was recognised that certain tributaries, represented, e.g., in the XVIIIth Dynasty tomb of Rekh-ma-Ra at Egyptian Thebes, as bearing vases of peculiar form, were of Mediterranean race, neither their precise habitat nor the degree of their civilisation could be determined while so few actual prehistoric remains were known in the Mediterranean lands. Nor did the Mycenæan objects which were lying obscurely in museums in 1870 or thereabouts provide a sufficient test of the real basis underlying the Hellenic myths of the Argolid, the Troad, and Crete, to cause these to be taken seriously.

Even Schliemann’s first excavations at Hissarlik in the Troad did not surprise those familiar equally with Neolithic settlements and Hellenistic remains. But the “Burnt City” of the second stratum, revealed in 1873, with its fortifications and vases, and the hoard of gold, silver, and bronze objects, which the discoverer connected with it (though its relation to the stratification is doubtful still), made a stir, which was destined to spread far outside the narrow circle of scholars when in 1876 Schliemann lighted on the Mycenæ graves.

Like the “letting in of water,” light at once poured in from all sides on the prehistoric period of Greece. It was established that the character of both the fabric and the decoration of the Mycenæan objects was not that of any well-known art. A wide range in space was proved by the identification of the inselsteine and the Ialysos vases with the new style, and a wide range in time by collation of the earlier Theræan and Hissarlik discoveries. A relation between objects of art described by Homer and the Mycenæan treasure was generally recognised, and a correct opinion prevailed that, while certainly posterior, the civilisation of the Iliad was reminiscent of the great Mycenæan period. Schliemann got to work again at Hissarlik in 1878, and greatly increased knowledge of the lower strata, but did not recognise the Mycenæan remains in his “Lydian” city of the sixth stratum; but by laying bare in 1884 the upper remains on the rock of Tiryns, he made a contribution to the science of domestic life in the Mycenæan period, which was amplified two years later by Tsountas’ discovery of the Mycenæ palace. From 1886 dates the finding of Mycenæan sepulchres outside the Argolid, from which, and from the continuation of Tsountas’ exploration of the buildings and lesser graves at Mycenæ, a large treasure, independent of Schliemann’s princely gift, has been gathered into the National Museum at Athens. In that year were excavated dome-tombs, most already rifled, in Attica, in Thessaly, in Cephalonia, and Laconia. In 1890 and 1893 Stæs cleared out more homely dome-tombs at Thoricus in Attica; and other graves, either rock-cut “beehives” or chambers, were found at Spata and Aphidnæ in Attica, in Ægina and Salamis, at the Heræum and Nauplia in the Argolid, near Thebes and Delphi, and lastly not far from the Thessalian Larissa.

But discovery was far from being confined to the Greek mainland and its immediate dependencies. The limits of the prehistoric area were pushed out to the central Ægean islands, all of which are singularly rich in evidence of the pre-Mycenæan period. The series of Syran built graves, containing crouching corpses, is the best and most representative that is known in the Ægean. Melos, long marked as containing early objects, but not systematically excavated until taken in hand by the British School at Athens in 1896, shows remains of all the Ægean periods.

Crete has been proved by the tombs of Anoja and Egarnos, by the excavations on the site of Knossos begun in 1878 by M. Minos Kalokairinos and resumed with startling success in 1900 by Messrs. Evans and Hogarth, and by those in the Dictæan cave and at Phæstos, Gournia, Zakro, and Palæokastro, to be prolific of remains of the prehistoric periods out of all proportion to remains of classical Hellenic culture. A map of Cyprus in the later Bronze Age now shows more than five-and-twenty settlements in and about the Mesaorea district alone, of which one, that at Enkomi, near the site of later Salamis, has yielded the richest gold treasure found outside Mycenæ. Half round the outermost circle to which Greek influence attained in the classical period remains of the same prehistoric civilisation have been happened on. M. Chantre, in 1894, picked up lustreless ware, like that of Hissarlik, in central Phrygia, and the English archæological expeditions sent subsequently into northwestern Anatolia have never failed to bring back “Ægean” specimens from the valleys of the Rhyndacus and Sangarius, and even of the Halys.

In Egypt, Mr. Petrie found painted sherds of Cretan style at Kahun in the Fayum in 1887, and farther up the Nile, at Tel-el-Amarna, chanced on bits of not less than eight hundred Ægean vases in 1889. There have now been recognised in the collections at Gizeh, Florence, London, Paris, and Bologna several Egyptian or Phœnician imitations of the Mycenæan style to set off against the many debts which the centres of Mycenæan culture owed to Egypt. Two Mycenæan vases were found at Sidon in 1885, and many fragments of Ægean, and especially Cypriote, pottery have been turned up during the recent excavation of sites in Philistia by the Palestine Fund. Southeastern Sicily has proved, ever since Orsi excavated the Sicel cemetery near Lentini in 1877, a mine of early remains, among which appear in regular succession Ægean fabrics and motives of decoration from the period of the second stratum at Hissarlik down to the latest Mycenæan. Sardinia has Mycenæan sites, e.g., at Abini near Teti, and Spain has yielded objects recognised as Mycenæan from tombs near Cadiz, and from Saragossa.

Arched Passage Way, Mycenæ

The results of three excavations will especially serve as rallying points and supply a standard of comparison. After Schliemann’s death, Dörpfeld returned to Hissarlik, and recognised in the huge remains of the sixth stratum, on the southern skirts of the citadel mound, a city of the same period as Mycenæ at its acme. Thus we can study there remains of a later stage, in one process of development superposed on earlier remains, after an intervening period. The links there missing are, however, apparent at Phylakopi in Melos, excavated systematically from 1896 to 1899. Here buildings of three main periods appear one on another. The earliest overlie in one spot a deposit of sherds of the most primitive type known in the Ægean and found in the earliest cist-graves. The second and third cities rise one out of the other without evidence of long interval. A third and more important site than either, Knossos in Crete, awaits fuller publication. Here are ruins of a great palace, mainly of two periods. Originally constructed about 2000 B.C., it was almost entirely rebuilt at the acme of the Mycenæan Age, but substructures and other remains of the earlier palace underlie the later.

Since recent researches, some of whose results are not yet published, have demonstrated that in certain localities, for instance, Cyprus, Crete, and most of the Ægean islands where Mycenæan remains were not long ago supposed to be merely sporadic, they form in fact a stratum to be expected on the site of almost every ancient Ægean settlement, we may safely assume that Mycenæan civilisation was a phase in the history of all the insular and peninsular territories of the east Mediterranean basin. Into the continents on the east and south we have no reason to suppose that its influence penetrated either very widely or very strongly.

The remains that especially concern us here belong to the later period illustrated by these discoveries, and have everywhere a certain uniformity. Some common influence spread at a certain era over the Ægean area and reduced almost to identity a number of local civilisations of similar origin but diverse development. Surviving influences of these, however, combined with the constant geographical conditions to reintroduce some local differentiation into the Mycenæan products.

The Neolithic Age in the Ægean has now been abundantly illustrated from the yellow bottom clay at Knossos, and its products do not differ materially from those implements and vessels with which man has everywhere sought to satisfy his first needs. The mass of the stone tools and weapons, and the coarse hand-made and burnished pottery, might well proceed from the spontaneous invention of each locality that possessed suitable stone and clay; but the common presence of flaked blades, arrow-heads, and blunt choppers of an obsidian, native, so far as is known, to Melos only, speaks of inter-communication even at this early period between many distant localities and the city whose remains have been unearthed at Phylakopi. The wide range of the peculiar cist-grave strengthens the belief that late Stone Age culture in the Ægean was not of sporadic development, and prepares us for the universality of a certain fiddle-shaped type of stone idol. Local divergence is, however, already apparent in the relative prevalence of certain forms: for example, a shallow bowl is common in Crete, but not in the Cyclades, while the pyxis, so common in the graves of Amorgos and Melos, has left little sign of itself in Crete; and from this point the further development of civilisation in the Ægean area results in increasing differentiation. The Greek mainland has produced as yet very little of the earlier periods (the excavators of the Heræum promise additions); but the primitive remains in the rest of the area may be divided into four classes of strong family likeness, but distinct development.

The pottery supplies the best criterion, and will suffice for our end. We have no such comprehensive and certain evidence from other classes of remains. Except for the Great Treasure of Hissarlik, and the weapons in Cycladic graves, there have been found as yet hardly any metal products of the period. Of the few stone products, one class, the “island idols,” already referred to, was obviously exported widely, and supplies an ill test either of place or date. There have not been discovered sufficiently numerous structures or graves to afford a basis of classification. Fortified towns have been explored in Melos, Siphnos, and the Troad, and a few houses in Ægina and Thera; but neither unaltered houses nor tombs of undoubted primitive character have appeared in Crete as yet, nor elsewhere than in the Cyclad isles.

Above the strata, however, which contain these remains of local divergent development, there lies in all districts of the Ægean area a rich layer of deposit, whose contents show a rapid and marked advance in civilisation, are essentially uniform, and have only subsidiary characteristics due to local influence or tradition. The civilisation there represented is not of an origin foreign to the area. The germs of all its characteristic fabrics, forms, and motives of decoration exist in the underlying strata, though not equally in all districts, and the change which Mycenæan art occasions is not always equally abrupt. It is most reasonable to see in these remains the result of the action of some accidental influence which greatly increased the wealth and capacity of one locality in the area, and caused it to impose its rapidly developing culture on all the rest. The measure of the reaction that took place in divers localities thereafter depended naturally on the point to which local civilisations had respectively advanced in the pre-Mycenæan period.

As to the decorative motives in vogue, there is less uniformity. The earlier Mycenæan vessels have curvilinear and generally spiraliform geometric schemes. These pass into naturalistic vegetable forms, and finally become in the finest typical vases almost exclusively marine—algæ, octopods, molluscs, shells, in many combinations. Everywhere animal, bird, and human forms are but seldom found. Man certainly appears very late, and in company with the oriental motives which characterise the Spata objects. Insects, especially butterflies, become common, and when their antennæ terminate in exquisite spirals, decorative art is at the end of its progress.

Silver Ox-head from Mycenæ

Not only in the continuous and universal commentary of painted earthenware, but in many other media, we have evidence of “Mycenæan” art, but varying in character according to the local abundance or variety of particular materials. We have reached an age when the artist had at his disposal not only terra-cotta, hard and soft stone, and wood, but much metal, gold, silver, lead, copper, bronze containing about twelve per cent. of tin alloy, as well as bone and ivory, and various compositions from soft lime plaster up to opaque glass. If it were not for the magnificent stone utensils, in the guise of lioness heads, triton shells, palm and lotus capitals, with spirals in relief, miniature shields for handles, which have come to light at Knossos, we should have supposed stone to be a material used (except architecturally) only for such rude metallic-seeming reliefs as stood over the Mycenæ gate and circle graves, or for heavy commonplace vases and lamps.

We have discovered no large free statuary in the round in any material as yet, though part of a hand at Knossos speaks to its existence; but figurines in metal, painted terra-cotta, and ivory, replacing the earlier stone idols, are fairly abundant. For these bronze is by far the commonest medium, and two types prevail; a female with bell-like or flounced divided skirt, and hair coiled or hanging in tails, and a male, nude but for a loin-cloth. The position of the hands and legs varies with the skill of the artist, as in all archaic statuary. Knossos has revealed for the first time the Mycenæan artist’s skill in painted plaster-relief (gesso duro). The life-size bull’s head from the northern entrance of the palace and fragments of human busts challenge comparison triumphantly with the finest Egyptian work. And from the same site comes the fullest assurance of a high development of fresco-painting.

Tiryns had already shown us a galloping bull on its palace wall, Mycenæ smaller figures and patterns, and Phylakopi its panel of flying-fish; but Knossos is in advance of all with its processions of richly dressed vase-carriers, stiff in general pose and incorrect in outline, but admirably painted in detail and noble in type; and its yet more novel scenes of small figures, in animated act of dance or ritual or war, irresistibly suggestive of early Attic vase-painting. Precious fragments of painted transparencies in rock-crystal have also survived, and both Mycenæ and Knossos have yielded stone with traces of painted design. Moulded glass of a cloudy blue-green texture seems to belong to the later period, at which carved ivory, previously rare, though found even in pre-Mycenæan strata, becomes common. The Spata tomb in Attica alone yielded 730 pieces of the latter material, helmeted heads in profile, mirror handles and sides of coffers of orientalising design, plaques with outlines of heraldic animals, and so forth. Articles in paste and porcelain of native manufacture, though often of exotic design, have been found most commonly where Eastern influence is to be expected; for instance, at Enkomi in Cyprus. But the glassy blue composition, known to Homer as κύανος, an imitation of lapis-lazuli, was used in architectural ornament at Tiryns.

But it is in precious metals, and in the kindred technique of gem-cutting, that Mycenæan art effects its most distinctive achievements. This is, as we have said, an age of metal. That stone implements had not entirely passed out of use is attested by the obsidian arrow-heads found in the circle graves, and the flint knives and basalt axes which lay beside vases of the full “Mycenæan” style at Cozzo del Pantano in Sicily. But they are survivals, unimportant beside the objects in copper, bronze, and precious metals. Iron has been found with remains of the period only as a great rarity. Some five rings, a shield boss, and formless lumps alone represent it at Mycenæ. In the fourth circle grave occurred thirty-four vessels of nearly pure copper. Silver makes its appearance before gold, and is found moulded into bracelets and bowls, and very rarely into figurines. Gold is more plentiful. Beaten, it makes face-masks, armlets, pendants, diadems, and all kinds of small votive objects; drawn, it makes rings whose bezels are engraved with the burin; riveted, it makes cups; and overlaid as leaf on bone, clay, wood, or bronze cores, it adorns hundreds of discs, buttons, and blades.

Next to Mycenæ in wealth of this metal ranks Enkomi in Cyprus, and pretty nearly all the tombs of the later period have yielded gold, conspicuously that of Vaphio. From the town sites, e.g., Phylakopi in Melos, and Knossos, it has disappeared almost entirely. Detached from the mass of golden objects which show primitive or tentative technique, are a few of such elaborate finish and fineness of handiwork, that it is hard to credit them to the same period and the same craftsmen. The Mycenæ inlaid dagger-blades are famous examples, and the technical skill, which beat out each of the Vaphio goblets in a single unriveted plate, has never been excelled.

We are fortunate in possessing very considerable remains of all kinds of construction and structural ornament of the Mycenæan period. The great walls of Mycenæ, of Tiryns (though perhaps due to an earlier epoch), and of the sixth layer at Hissarlik, show us the simple scheme of fortification—massive walls with short returns and corner towers, but no flank defences, approached by ramps or stairs from within and furnished with one great gate and a few small sally-ports. Chambers in the thickness of the wall seem to have served for the protection of stores rather than of men. The great palaces at Knossos and Phæstos, however, are of much more complicated plan. Remains of much architectural decoration have been found in these palaces—at Mycenæ, frescoes of men and animals; at Knossos, frescoes of men, fish, and sphinxes, vegetable designs, painted reliefs, and rich conventional ornament, such as an admirably carved frieze in hard limestone; at Tiryns, traces of a frieze inlaid with lapis-lazuli glass, and also frescoes. The rough inner walls, that appear now on these sites, must once have looked very different.

Certain chambers at Knossos, paved and lined with gypsum, and two in Melos, have square central piers. These seem to have had a religious significance, and are possibly shrines devoted to pillar-worship. The houses of the great dead were hardly less elaborate. The “Treasury of Atreus” had a moulded façade with engaged columns in a sort of proto-Doric order and marble facing; and there is good reason to suppose that its magnificent vault was lined within with metal ornament or hanging draperies. The construction itself of this and the other masonry domes bespeaks skill of a high order. For lesser folk beehive excavations were made in the rock, and at the latest period a return was made apparently to the tetragonal chamber; but now it has a pitched or vaulted roof, and generally a short passage of approach whose walls converge overhead towards a pointed arch but do not actually meet. The corpses are laid on the floor, neither mummified nor cremated; but in certain cases they were possibly mutilated and “scarified,” and the limbs were then enclosed in chest urns. There is evidence for this both in Crete and Sicily. But the order of burial, which first made Mycenæan civilisation known to the modern world, continues singular. Similar shaft graves, whether contained within a circle of slabs or not, have never been found again.

The latest excavation has at last established beyond all cavil that the civilisation which was capable of such splendid artistic achievement was not without a system of written communication. Thousands of clay tablets (many being evidently labels) and a few inscriptions on pottery from the palace at Knossos have confirmed Mr. A. J. Evans’ previous deduction, based on gems, masons’ and potters’ marks, and one short inscription on stone found in the Dictæan cave, that more than one script was in use in the period. Most of the Knossos tablets are written in an upright linear alphabetic or syllabic character, often with the addition of ideographs, and showing an intelligible system of decimal numeration. Since many of the same characters have been found in use as potters’ marks on sherds in Melos, which are of earlier date than the Mycenæan period, the later civilisation cannot be credited with their invention. Other clay objects found at Knossos, as well as gems from the east of Crete, show a different system more strictly pictographic. This seems native to the island, and to have survived almost to historic times; but the origin of the linear system is more doubtful. No such tablets or sealings have yet been found outside Crete, and their writing remains undeciphered. The affinities of the linear script seem to be with the Asianic systems, Cypriote and Hittite, and perhaps with later Greek. The characters are obviously not derived from the Phœnician.

This Mycenæan civilisation, as we know it from its remains, belongs to the Ægean area (i.e., roughly the Greek), and to no other area with which we are at present acquainted. It is apparently not the product of any of the elder races which developed culture in the civilised areas to the east or southeast, much as it owed to those races. It would be easy to add to the singular vase-forms, script, lustrous paint, idols, gems, types of house and tomb, and so forth, already mentioned, a long list of Mycenæan decorative schemes which, even if their remote source lies in Egypt, Babylonia, or inner Anatolia, are absolutely peculiar in their treatment. But style is conclusive. From first to last the persistent influence of a true artistic ideal differentiates Mycenæan objects from the hieratic or stylised products of Egypt or Phœnicia. A constant effort to attain symmetry and decorative effect for its own sake inspires the geometric designs. Those taken from organic life show continual reference to the model and a “naturalistic grasp of the whole situation,” which resists convention and often ignores decorative propriety. The human form is fearlessly subjected to experiment, the better to attain lightness, life, and movement in its portrayal. A foreign motive is handled with a breadth and vitality which renders its new expression practically independent. The conventional bull of an Assyrian relief was referred to the image of a living bull by the Knossian artist, and made to express his emotions of fear or wrath by the Vaphio goldsmith, the Cypriote worker in ivory mirror handles, or the “island-gem” cutter.

Exterior View of the Treasury of Atreus

Since we have a continuous series of links by which the development of the characteristic Mycenæan products can be traced within the area back to very primitive forms, we can fearlessly assert that not only did the full flower of the Mycenæan civilisation proper belong to the Ægean area, but also its essential origin. That it came to have intimate relations with other contemporary civilisations, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, perhaps “Hittite,” and early began to contract a huge debt, especially to Egypt, is equally certain. Not to mention the certainly imported Nilotic objects found on Mycenæan sites, and bearing hieroglyphic inscriptions and cartouches of Pharaonic personages, the later Ægean culture is deeply indebted to the Nile for forms and decorative motives.

At what epoch did Ægean civilisation reach its full development? It is little use to ask when it arose. A terminus a quo in the Neolithic Age can be dated only less vaguely than a geological stratum. But it is known within fairly definite limits when it ceased to be a dominant civilisation. Nothing but derived products of sub-Mycenæan style falls within the full Iron Age in the Ægean. Bronze, among useful metals, accompanies almost alone the genuine Mycenæan objects, at Enkomi in Cyprus, as at Mycenæ. This fact supplies a terminus ad quem, to which a date may be assigned at least as precise as scholars assign to the Homeric lays. For these represent a civilisation spread over the same area and in process of transition from bronze to iron, and if they fall in the ninth century B.C., then the Mycenæan period proper ends a little earlier, at any rate in the West. It is possible, indeed probable, that in Asia Minor and Cyprus, where the descent of northern tribes about 1000 B.C., remembered by the Greeks as the “Dorian Invasion,” did not have any direct effect, the Mycenæan culture survived longer in something like purity, and passed by an uninterrupted process of development into the Hellenic; and even in Crete, where there was certainly a cataclysm, and in the Argolid, where art was temporarily eclipsed about the tenth century, earlier influence survived and came once more to the surface when peace was restored. Persistence of artistic influence under a new order, and differences in the artistic history of different districts widely sundered, have to be taken into account. The appearance, e.g., of late Mycenæan objects in Cyprus, does not necessarily falsify the received Mycenæan dates in mainland Greece.

For the main fact, however, viz., the age of greatest florescence all over the area, a singular coincidence of testimony points to the period of the XVIIIth Pharaonic Dynasty in Egypt. To this dynasty refer all the scarabs or other objects inscribed with royal cartouches (except an alabaster lid from Knossos, bearing the name of the earlier “Shepherd King,” Khyan), as yet actually found with true Mycenæan objects, even in Cyprus. In a tomb of this period at Thebes was found a bronze patera of fine Mycenæan style. At Tel-el-Amarna, the site of a capital city which existed only in the reign of Amenhotep IV, have been unearthed by far the most numerous fragments of true “Ægean” pottery found in Egypt; and of that singular style which characterises Tel-el-Amarna art, the art of the Knossian frescoes is irresistibly suggestive. To the XVIIIth and two succeeding dynasties belong the tomb-paintings which represent vases of Ægean form; and to these same dynasties Mr. Petrie’s latest comparisons between the fabrics, forms, and decorative motives of Egypt and Mycenæ have led him. The lapse of time between the eighteenth and the tenth centuries is by no means too long, in the opinion of most competent authorities, to account for the changes which take place in Mycenæan art.

The question of race, which derives a special interest from the possibility of a family relation between the Mycenæan and the subsequent Hellenic stocks, is a controversial matter as yet. The light recently thrown on Mycenæan cult does not go far to settle the racial problem. The aniconic ritual, involving tree and pillar symbols of divinity, which prevailed at one period, also prevailed widely elsewhere than in the Ægean, and we are not sure of the divinity symbolised. Even if sure that it was the Father God, whose symbol alike in Crete and Caria is the labrys or double axe, we could not say if Caria or Crete were prior, and whether the Father be Aryan or Semitic or neither.

When it is remembered that, firstly, knowing not a word of the Mycenæan language, we are quite ignorant of its affinities; secondly, not enough Mycenæan skulls have yet been recovered to establish more than the bare fact that the race was mixed and not wholly Asiatic; and thirdly, since identity of civilisation in no sense necessarily entails identity of race, we may have to do not with one or two, but with many races—it will be conceded that it is more useful at present to attempt to narrow the issue by excluding certain claimants than to pronounce in favour of any one. The facial types represented not only on the Knossian frescoes, but by statuettes and gems, are distinctly non-Asiatic, and recall strongly the high-crowned brachycephalic type of the modern northern Albanians and Cretan hillmen. Of the elder civilised races about the Levantine area the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians may be dismissed at once. We know their art from beginning to end, and its character is not at any period the same as that of Ægean art. As for the Phœnicians, for whom on the strength of Homeric tradition a strong claim has been put forward, it cannot be said to be impossible that some objects thought to be Mycenæan are of Sidonian origin, since we know little or nothing of Sidonian art. But the presumption against this Semitic people having had any serious share in Mycenæan development is strong, since facial types apart, the only scripts known to have been used in the Mycenæan area and period are in no way affiliated to the Phœnician alphabet, and neither the characteristic forms nor the characteristic style of Phœnician art, as we know it, appear in Mycenæan products. The one thing, of which recent research has assured us in this matter, is this, that the Keftiu, represented in XVIIIth Dynasty tombs at Thebes, were a “Mycenæan” folk, an island people of the northern sea. They came into intimate contact, both peaceful and warlike, with Egypt, and to them no doubt are owed the Ægean styles and products found on Nile sites. Exact parallels to their dress and products, as represented by Egyptian artists, appear in the work of Cretan artists; and it is now generally accepted that the Keftiu were “Mycenæans” of Crete at any rate, whatever other habitat they may have possessed.

As to place of origin, Central Europe or any western or northern part of the continent is out of the question. Mycenæan art is shown by various remains to have moved westwards and northwards, not vice versa. It arose within the Ægean area, in the Argolid as some, e.g., the Heræum excavators, seem to propose, or the Cyclades, or Rhodes; or, if outside, then the issue is narrowed for practical purposes to a region about which we know next to nothing as yet, northern Libya, and to Asia Minor. So far as the Mycenæan objects themselves testify, they point to a progress not from south or west, but from east. In the western localities, notably Crete and Mycenæ, we have more remains of highly developed Mycenæan civilisation, but less of its early stages than elsewhere. Nothing in the Argolid, but much in the Troad, prepares us for the Mycenæan metallurgy. The appearance of Mycenæan forms and patterns is abrupt in Crete, but graduated in other islands, especially Thera and Melos. The Cretan linear script seems to be of “Asianic” family, and to be inscribed in Melos on sherds of earlier date than its appearance at Knossos. Following Mycenæan development backwards in this manner, we seem to tend towards the Anatolian coasts of the Ægean, and especially the rich and little-known areas of Rhodes and Caria.

It does not advance seriously the solution of the racial problem to turn to Greek literary tradition. Now that we are assured of the wide range and the long continuance of the influence of Mycenæan civilisation, overlapping the rise of Hellenic art, we can hardly question that the early peoples whom the Greeks knew as Pelasgi, Minyæ, Leleges, Danai, Carians, and so forth, shared in it. But were they its authors? and who, after all, were they themselves? The Greeks believed them their own kin, but what value are we to attach to the belief of an age to which scientific ethnology and archæology were unknown? Nor is it useful to select traditions, e.g., to accept those about the Pelasgi, and to override those which connect the Achæans equally closely with Mycenæan centres. We are gradually learning that the classical Hellene was of no pure race, but the result of a blend of several racial stocks, into which those pre-existing in his land can hardly fail to have entered; and if we have been able to determine that Mycenæan art was distinguished by just that singular quality of idealism which is of the essence of the art which succeeded it in the same area (whatever be the racial connection), it can scarcely be doubted in reason that Mycenæan civilisation was in some sense the parent of the later civilisation of Hellas. In fact, now that the Mycenæan remains are no longer to be regarded as isolated phenomena on Greek soil, but are seen to be intimately connected on the one hand with a large class of objects which carry the evolution of civilisation in the Ægean area itself back to the Stone Age, and on the other with the earlier products of Hellenic development, the problem is no longer purely one of antiquarian ethnology. We ask less what race was so greatly gifted, than what geographical or other circumstances will account for the persistence of a certain peculiar quality of civilisation in the Ægean area.[b] An eloquent summary of our Mycenæan knowledge and a lively description of life such as it may have been in Mycenæ has been drawn by Chrestos Tsountas and J. Irving Manatt in their work, The Mycenæan Age, from which we quote at length.

Sepulchral Enclosure, Mycenæ

THE PROBLEM OF MYCENÆAN CHRONOLOGY

Whether or not the authors of this distinct and stately civilisation included among their achievements a knowledge of letters, their monuments thus far address us only in the universal language of form and action. Of their speech we have yet to read the first syllable. The vase handles of Mycenæ may have some message for us, if no more than a pair of heroic names; and the nine consecutive characters from the cave of Cretan Zeus must have still more to say when we find the key. We may hope, at least, if this ancient culture ever recovers its voice, to find it not altogether unfamiliar: we need not be startled if we catch the first lisping accent of what has grown full and strong in the Achæan epic.

But for the present we have to do with a dumb age, with a race whose artistic expression amazes us all the more in the dead silence of their history. So far as we yet know from their monuments, they have recorded not one fixed point in their career, they have never even written down their name as a people.

Now, a dateless era and a nameless race—particularly in the immediate background of the stage on which we see the forces of the world’s golden age deploying—are facts to be accepted only in the last resort. The student of human culture cannot look upon the massive walls, the solemn domes, the exquisite creations of what we call Mycenæan art, without asking—When? By whom? In default of direct and positive evidence, he will make the most of the indirect and probable.

We have taken a provisional and approximate date for the meridian age of Mycenæan culture—namely, from the sixteenth to the twelfth century B.C. We have also assumed that the Island culture was already somewhat advanced as far back as the earlier centuries of the second millennium before our era. This latter datum is based immediately on geological calculations: M. Fouqué, namely, has computed a date circa 2000 B.C. for the upheaval which buried Thera, and thus preserved for us the primitive monuments of Ægean civilisation. Whatever be the value of Fouqué’s combinations—and they have been vigorously, if not victoriously, assailed—we may reach a like result by another way round. The Island culture is demonstrably older than the Mycenæan—it must have attained the stage upon which we find it at Thera a century or two at least before the bloom-time came in Argolis. If, then, we can date that bloom-time, we can control within limits the geologists’ results.

Here we call in the aid of Egyptology. In Greece we find datable Egyptian products in Mycenæan deposits, and conversely in datable Egyptian deposits we find Mycenæan products.

To take the first Mycenæan finds in Egypt. In a tomb of 1100 B.C., or within fifty years of that either way, at Kahun, Flinders Petrie found along with some dozens of bodies, “a great quantity of pottery, Egyptian, Phœnician, Cypriote, and Ægean”—notably an Ægean vase with an ivy leaf and stalk on each side, which he regards as the beginning of natural design. Further, at Gurob and elsewhere, the same untiring explorer has traced the Mycenæan false-necked vase or Bügelkanne through a series of dated stages, “a chain of examples in sequence showing that the earliest geometrical pottery of Mycenæ begins about 1400 B.C., and is succeeded by the beginning of natural designs about 1100 B.C.”

But long before these actual Mycenæan products came to light in Egypt, Egyptian art had told its story of relations with the Ægean folk. On the tomb-frescoes of Thebes we see pictured in four groups the tributaries of Tehutimes III (about 1500 B.C.), bringing their gifts to that great conqueror; among them, as we are told by the hieroglyphic text that runs with the painting, are “the princes of the land of Keftu [or Kefa] (Phœnicia) and of the islands in the great sea.” And the tribute in their hands includes vases of distinct Mycenæan style.

On the other hand, we find datable Egyptian products in Mycenæan deposits in Greece. From Mycenæ itself and from Ialysos in Rhodes we have scarabs bearing the cartouches of Amenhotep III and of his queen Thi; and fragments of Egyptian porcelain, also from Mycenæ, bear the cartouches of the same king, whose reign is dated to the latter half of the fifteenth century.

We have already noted the recurrence at Gurob, Kahun, and Tel-el-Amarna of the characters which were first found on the vase handles of Mycenæ; and this seemed at one time to have an important bearing on Mycenæan chronology. But in the wider view of the subject which has been opened up by Evans’ researches, this can no longer be insisted upon as an independent datum. However, the occurrence of these signs in a town demonstrably occupied by Ægean peoples at a given date has corroborative value.

While it can hardly be claimed that any or all of these facts amount to final proof, they certainly establish a strong probability that at least from the fifteenth century B.C. there was traffic between Egypt and the Mycenæan world. Whatever be said for the tomb-frescoes of Tehutimes’ foreign tribute-bearers and the scarabs from Mycenæ and Rhodes, we cannot explain away Mr. Petrie’s finds in the Fayum. The revelations of Tel-Gurob can leave no doubt that the brief career of the ancient city on that spot—say from 1450 to 1200 B.C.—was contemporaneous with the bloom-time of Mycenæan civilisation.

Now most, if not all, of the “Ægean” pottery from Gurob, like that pictured in the tomb-frescoes, belongs to the later Mycenæan styles as we find them in the chamber-tombs and ruined houses—in the same deposits, in fact, with the scarabs and broken porcelain which carry the cartouches of Amenhotep and Queen Thi. The earlier period of Mycenæan art is thus shown to be anterior to the reign of Tehutimes III; and as that period cannot conceivably be limited to a few short generations, the sixteenth century is none too early for the upper limit of the Mycenæan Age. We should, perhaps, date it at least a century farther back. Thus we approximate the chronology to which M. Fouqué has been led by geological considerations; while, on the other hand, more recent inquirers are inclined to reduce by a century or two the antiquity of the convulsion in which Thera perished, and thus approximate our own datum.

For the lower limit of the Mycenæan Age we have taken the twelfth century, though certain archæologists and historians are inclined to a much more recent date—some even bringing it three or four centuries further down.

This is not only improbable on its face, but at variance with the facts. To take but one test, the Mycenæan Age hardly knew the use of iron; at Mycenæ itself it was so rare that we find it only in an occasional ornament such as a ring. No iron was found in the prehistoric settlements at Hissarlik until 1890, when Dr. Schliemann came across two lumps of the metal, one of which had possibly served as the handle of a staff. “It is therefore certain,” he says, “that iron was already known in the second or ‘burnt city’; but it was probably at that time rarer and more precious than gold.” In Egypt, on the other hand, iron was known as early as the middle of the second millennium B.C., and if the beehive and chamber-tombs at Mycenæ are to be assigned to a period as late as the ninth century, the rare occurrence of iron in them becomes quite inexplicable.

The Testimony of Art

From the seventeenth or sixteenth to the twelfth century B.C., then, we may regard as the bloom-time of Mycenæan culture, and of the race or races who wrought it out. But we need not assume that their arts perished with their political decline. Even when that gifted people succumbed to or blended with another conquering race, their art, especially in its minor phases, lived on, though under less favouring conditions. There were no more patrons like the rich and munificent princes of Tiryns and Mycenæ; and domed tombs with their wealth of decoration were no longer built. Still, certain types of architecture, definitively wrought out by the Mycenæans, became an enduring possession of Hellenic art, and so of the art of the civilised world; while from other Mycenæan types were derived new forms of equally far-reaching significance.

The correspondence of the gateways at Tiryns with the later Greek propylæa, and that of the Homeric with the prehistoric palaces, is noteworthy; so, too, is the obvious derivation of the typical form of the Greek temple, consisting of vestibule and cella, from the Mycenæan magaron. That the Doric column is of the same lineage is a fact long ago recognised by the ablest authorities. In fact, the Mycenæan pillars known to us, whether in actual examples as embedded in the façades of the two beehive tombs or in art representations, as in the lion relief and certain ivory models, while varying in important details, exhibit now one, now another of the features of the Doric column. Thus, all have in common abacus, echinus, and cymatium—the last member adorned with ascending leaves just as in the earliest capitals of the Doric order. Again, the Doric fluting is anticipated in the actual pilasters of “Clytemnestra’s tomb,” and in an ivory model. And as the Doric column has no base, but rests directly on the stylobate, so the wooden pillars in the Mycenæan halls appear to rise directly from the ground in which their stone bases are almost entirely embedded.

That Mycenæan art outlasted the social régime under which it had attained its splendid bloom is sufficiently attested by the Homeric poems. Doubtless, the Achæan system, when it fell before the aggressive Dorian, must have left many an heirloom above ground, as well as those which its tombs and ruins had hidden down to our own day. And, again, the poems in their primitive strata undoubtedly reflect the older order, and offer us many a picture at first hand of a contemporary age. Thus the dove-cup of Mycenæ, or another from the same hand, may have been actually known to the poet who described old Nestor’s goblet in our eleventh Iliad; and the cyanos frieze of Tiryns may well have inspired the singer of the Phæacian tale, or at least helped out his fancy in decorating Alcinous’ palace. Still, it is in the more recent strata of the poems that we find the great transcripts of art-creations and the clearest indications of the very processes met with in the monuments. To take but one instance, there is the shield of Achilles forged at Thetis’ intercession by Hephæstus and emblazoned with a series of scenes from actual mundane life. (Iliad, XVIII. 468-613.) The subjects are at once Mycenæan and Homeric. On the central boss, for example, the Olympian smith “wrought the earth and the heavens and the sea and the unwearying sun,” very much as the Mycenæan artist sets sun, moon, and sky in the upper field of his great signet. Again, the city under siege, while “on the walls to guard it, stand their dear wives and infant children, and with these the old men,” appears to be almost a transcript of the scene which still stirs our blood as we gaze upon the beleaguered town on the silver cup. But it is less the subject than the technique that reveals artistic heredity, and when we find Homer’s Olympian craftsman employing the selfsame process in the forging of the shield which we can now see for ourselves in the inlaid swords of Mycenæ, we can hardly doubt that that process was still employed in the poet’s time.

In this sense of an aftermath of art, Mycenæan influence outlasted by centuries the overthrow of Mycenæan power; and the fact is one to be considered in establishing a chronology. We have taken as our lower limit the catastrophe in which the old order at Mycenæ and elsewhere obviously came to an end. But the old stock survived,—“scattered and peeled” though it must have been,—and carried on, if it did not teach the conqueror, their old arts. If we are to comprehend within the Mycenæan Age all the centuries through which we can trace this Mycenæan influence, then we shall bring that age down to the very dawn of historical Greece. In this view it is no misnomer to speak of the Æginetan gold find recently acquired by the British Museum as a Mycenæan treasure.

Acropolis of Mycenæ

THE PROBLEM OF THE MYCENÆAN RACE

We have seen that Mycenæan art was no exotic, transplanted full grown into Greece, but rather a native growth—influenced though it was by the earlier civilisations of the Cyclades and the East. This indigenous art, distinct and homogeneous in character, no matter whence came its germs and rudiments, must have been wrought out by a strong and gifted race. That it was of Hellenic stock we have assumed to be self-evident. But, as this premise is still in controversy, we have to inquire whether (aside from art) there are other considerations which make against the Hellenic origin of the Mycenæan peoples, and compel us to regard them as immigrants from the islands or the Orient.

In the first place, recalling the results of our discussion of domestic and sepulchral architecture, we observe that neither in the Ægean nor in Syria do we find the gable-roof which prevails at Mycenæ. Nor would the people of these warm and dry climates have occasion to winter their herds in their own huts—an ancestral custom to which we have traced the origin of the avenues to the beehive tombs.

Again, we have seen reason to refer the shaft-graves to a race or tribe other than that whose original dwelling we have recognised in the sunken hut. To this pit-burying stock we have assigned the upper-story habitations at Mycenæ. If we are right, now, in explaining this type of dwelling as a reminiscence of the pile-hut, it would follow that this stock, too, was of northern origin. The lake-dwelling habit, we know, prevailed throughout Northern Europe, an instance occurring, as we have seen, even in the Illyrian peninsula; while we have no reason to look for its origin to the Orient or the Ægean. It is indeed true that the island-folk were no strangers to the pile-dwelling, but this rather goes to show that they were colonists from the mainland.

But, apart from the evidence of the upper-story abodes, are there other indications of an element among the Mycenæan people which had once actually dwelt in lakes or marshes?

Monuments like the stone models from Melos and Amorgos have not indeed been found in the Peloponnesus, or on the mainland, but in default of such indirect testimony we have the immediate witness of actual settlements. Of the four most famous cities of the age, Mycenæ, Tiryns, Orchomenos, and Amyclæ, it is a singular fact that but one has a mountain-site, while the other three were once surrounded by marshes. The rock on which Tiryns is built, though it rises to a maximum elevation of some sixty feet above the plain, yet sinks so low on the north that the lower citadel is only a few feet above the level of the sea. Now this plain, as Aristotle asserts, and as the nature of the ground still bears witness, was originally an extensive morass. The founders, therefore, must have chosen this rock for their settlement, not because it was a stronghold in itself, but because it was protected by the swamp out of which it rose.

What is true of Tiryns holds for Orchomenos as well. The original site was down in the plain until the periodic inundations of the lake forced the inhabitants to rebuild on the slopes of Mount Acontion; and Orchomenos was not the only primitive settlement in this great marsh. Tradition tells us also of Athenæ, Eleusis, Arne, Midea—cities which had long perished, and were but dimly remembered in historic times. To one of these, or to some other whose name has not come down to us, belong the remarkable remains on the Island of Goulas or Gha, which is connected with the shore by an ancient mole. During the Greek Revolution this island-fort was the refuge of the neighbouring population who found greater security there than in the mountains.

It is usually held that, when these Copaïc cities were founded, the region was in the main drained and arable, whereas afterwards, the natural outlets being choked up, the imprisoned waters flooded the plain, turned it into a lake, and so overwhelmed the towns. But, obviously, this is reversing the order of events. To have transformed the lake into a plain and kept it such would have demanded the co-operation of populous communities in the construction of costly embankments and perpetual vigilance in keeping them intact. Where were such organised forces to be found at a time anterior to the foundation of the cities themselves? Is it not more reasonable to believe that the builders of these cities—instead of finding Copaïs an arable plain, and failing to provide against its inundation—were induced by the very fact of its being a lake to establish themselves in it upon natural islands like the rock of Goulas, on artificial elevations, or even in pile-settlements? It is possible, indeed, that on some unusual rise of the waters, towns were submerged, but it is quite as probable that without any such catastrophe the inhabitants finally abandoned these of their own accord to settle in higher, healthier, and more convenient regions.

The case of Amyclæ is no exception. The prehistoric as well as the historic site is probably to be identified with that of the present village of Mahmud Bey, some five miles south of Sparta. The ground is low and wet, and in early times was undoubtedly a marsh.

In the plain of Thessaly, again, we may trace the same early order. There, where tradition (backed by the conclusions of modern science) tells us that the inflowing waters used to form stagnant lakes, we find low artificial mounds strewn with primitive potsherds. On these mounds, Lolling holds, the people pitched their settlements to secure them against overflow.

The choice of these marshy or insulated sites is all the more singular from the environment. Around Lake Copaïs, about Tiryns and Amyclæ, as well as in Thessaly, rise mountains which are nature’s own fastnesses and which would seem to invite primitive man to their shelter. The preference for these lowland or island settlements then, can only be explained in the first instance by immemorial custom, and, secondly, by consequent inexperience in military architecture. Naturally, a lake-dwelling people will be backward in learning to build stone walls strong enough to keep off a hostile force. And in default of such skill, instead of settling on the mountain slopes, they would in their migrations choose sites affording the best natural fortifications akin to their ancient environment of marsh or lake—reinforcing this on occasion by a moat, an embankment, or a pile-platform.

That the people in question once actually followed this way of living is beyond a doubt. Amyclæ shows no trace of wall, and probably never had any beyond a mere earthwork. The Cyclopean wall of Tiryns, as it now stands, does not belong to the earliest settlement, nor is it of uniform date. Adler holds that the first fortress must have been built of wood and sun-dried bricks. This construction may possibly account for those remarkable galleries whose origin and function are not yet altogether clear. The mere utility of the chambers for storage—a purpose they did unquestionably serve—hardly answers to the enormous outlay involved in contriving them. May we not, then, recognise in them a reminiscence of the primitive palisade-earthwork? In the so-called Lower Citadel of Tiryns we find no such passages, possibly because its Cyclopean wall was built at a later date. Likewise no proper galleries have yet been found at Mycenæ, and it is highly improbable that any such ever existed there. What had long been taken for a gallery in the north wall proves to be nothing but a little chamber measuring less than seven by twelve feet. Obviously, then, the gallery was not an established thing in fortress-architecture, and this fact shows that it did not originate with the builders of stone walls, but came to them as a heritage from earlier times and a more primitive art.

In fact, we find in the terramare of Italy palisade and earthwork fortifications so constructed that they may be regarded as a first stage in the development which culminates in the Tiryns galleries. The construction of the wall at Casione near Parma is thus described:[4] “Piles arranged in two parallel rows are driven in the ground with an inward slant so as to meet at the top, and this Δ-shaped gallery is then covered with earth. Along the inside of this embankment is carried a continuous series of square pens, built of beams laid one upon another, filled with earth and brushwood, and finally covered with a close-packed layer of sand and pebbles. This arrangement not only strengthens the wall but provides a level platform for its defenders.” Thus the space between these palisades would closely resemble the “arched” corridors of Tiryns, while the square pens (if covered over without being filled up) would correspond to the chambers.

These facts strengthen the inferences to which we have been led by our study of the stone models and the upper-story dwellings. And they point to the region beyond Mount Olympus as the earlier seat of this lake-dwelling contingent of the Mycenæan people as well as of their kinsmen of the earth-huts. And we have other evidence that the Mycenæan cities, at least the four of chief importance, were founded by a people who were not dependent on the sea and in whose life the pursuits of the sea were originally of little moment. Mycenæ and Orchomenos are at a considerable remove from the coast, while Amyclæ is a whole day’s journey from the nearest salt-water. Tiryns alone lies close to the sea-board; and, indeed, the waves of the Argolic Gulf must have washed yet nearer when its walls were reared. But, obviously, it was not the nearness of the sea that drew the founders to this low rock. For it is a harbourless shore that neighbours it, while a little farther down lies the secure haven of Nauplia guarded by the impregnable height of Palamedes; and it is yet to be explained why the Tirynthians, if they were a sea-faring people, did not build their city there. Again, the principal entrance to Tiryns is not on the side towards the sea, but on the east or landward side. This goes to show that even when the Cyclopean wall was built, certainly long after the first settlement, the people must have been still devoted mainly to tilling the soil and tending flocks, occupations to which the fertile plain and marshy feeding grounds would invite them. So in historic times, also, the town appears to have lain to the east of the citadel, not between it and the sea.

Even if it be granted that these Mycenæan cities were settled by immigrants who came by sea, it does not follow that they were originally a sea-faring folk. The primitive Dorians were hardly a maritime people, yet Grote has shown that their conquest of the Peloponnesus was in part effected by means of a fleet which launched from the Malian Gulf; and their kinsmen, who settled in Melos, Thera, and Crete, in all probability, sailed straight from the same northern port.

The Minyæ, who founded Orchomenos, Curtius regards as pre-eminently a seafaring race; and he seeks to account for their inland settlement by assuming that they were quick to realise the wealth to be won by draining and tilling the swamp. But this is hardly tenable. Whatever our estimate of Minyan shrewdness, they must have had their experience in reclaiming swamp land yet to acquire and on this ground. It was the outcome of age-long effort in winning new fields from the waters and guarding them when won. The region invited settlement because it offered the kind of security to which they were wonted; the winning of wealth was not the motive but the fortunate result.

Again, if the Mycenæans had been from the outset a maritime race we should expect to find the ship figuring freely in their art-representations. But this is far from being the case. We have, at last, one apparent instance of the kind on a terra-cotta fragment found in the acropolis at Mycenæ in 1892. On this we seem to have a boat, with oars and rudder, and curved fore and aft like the Homeric νῆες ἀμφιέλισσαι. Below appear what we may take to be dolphins. But this unique example can hardly establish the maritime character of the Mycenæans.

Along with this unfamiliarity with ships, we have to remark also their abstinence from fish. In the remains of Tiryns and Mycenæ we have found neither a fish-hook nor a fish-bone, though we do find oysters and other shellfish such as no doubt could be had in abundance along the adjacent shores. In the primitive remains of the Italian terramare there is the same absence of anything that would suggest fishing or fish-eating; and, indeed, linguistic evidence confirms these observations. Greek and Latin have no common term for fish; and we may fairly conclude that the Græco-Italic stock before the separation were neither fishermen or fish-eaters. That they were slow to acquire a taste for fish, even after the separation, is attested not only by the negative evidence of their remains in the Argolid and on the Po but by the curious reticence of Homer. His heroes never go fishing but once and then only in the last pinch of famine—“when the bread was all spent from out the ship and hunger gnawed at their belly.”

Now that we find in Greece, five or six centuries earlier than the poems, a people in all probability hailing from the same region whence came the ancestors of the Homeric Greeks, with the same ignorance of, or contempt for, a fish diet, and building their huts on piles like the primitive Italians whose earthworks further appear to have set the copy for the Tirynthian galleries—can we doubt that this people sprung from the same root with the historic Greeks and their kinsmen of Italy? The conclusion appears so natural and so logical, that it must require very serious and solid objections to shake it. But, instead of that, our study of Mycenæan manners and institutions—both civil and religious—affords strong confirmation. In the matter of dress we find the historical Greeks the heirs of the Mycenæans, and the armour of the Homeric heroes—when we get behind the epic glamour of it—differs little from what we know in the Mycenæan monuments.

While our knowledge of Mycenæan religion is vague at the best, and we must recognise in the dove-idols and dove-temples the insignia of an imported Aphrodite-cult, we have beyond a reasonable doubt also to recognise a genuine Hellenic divinity with her historical attributes clearly foreshadowed in Artemis. Again, while the Homeric Greeks themselves are not presented to us as worshippers of the dead after the custom avouched by the altar-pits of Mycenæ and Tiryns, we do find in the poems an echo at least of this cult, and among the later Hellenes it resumes the power of a living belief. So, though Homer seems to know cremation only, and this has been taken for full proof that the Mycenæans were not Greeks, the traces of embalming in the poems clearly point to an earlier custom of simple burial as we find it uniformly attested by the Mycenæan tombs. And, here, again, historical Greece reverts to the earlier way. In Greece proper, at least in Attica, the dead were not burned,—not even in the age of the Dipylon vases,—and yet the Athenians of that day were Greeks. So, among the earlier Italians, burial was the only mode of dealing with the dead, and the usage was so rooted in their habits that even after cremation was introduced some member of the body (e.g., a finger) was always cut off and buried intact. We need not repeat what we have elsewhere said of the funeral banquet, the immolation of victims, the burning of raiment—all bearing on the same conclusion and cumulating the evidence that the Greeks of Homer, and so of the historic age, are the lineal heirs of Mycenæan culture.

If the proof of descent on these lines is strong, it is strengthened yet more by all we can make out regarding the political and social organisation. That monarchy was the Mycenæan form of government is sufficiently attested by the strong castles, each taken up in large part by a single princely mansion. But “the rule of one man” is too universal in early times to be a criterion of race. Far more significant is the evidence we have for a clan-system such as we afterwards find in full bloom among the Hellenes.

The clan, as we know it in historic times, and especially in Attica, was a factor of prime importance in civil, social, and religious life. It was composed of families which claim to be, and for the most part actually were, descended from a common ancestor. These originally lived together in clan-villages—of which we have clear reminiscences in the clan-names of certain Attic demes, as Boutadai, Perithoidai, Skanbonidai. Not only did the clan form a village by itself, but it held and cultivated its land in common. It built the clan-village on the clan-estate; and as the clansmen dwelt together in life, so in death they were not divided. Each clan had its burial-place in its own little territory, and there at the tomb it kept up the worship of its dead, and especially of its hero-founder.

That the Mycenæans lived under a like clan-system, the excavation of the tombs of the lower town has shown conclusively. The town was composed of villages more or less removed from one another, each the seat of a clan. We have no means of determining whether the land was held and tilled in common, but we do know that by each village lay the common clan-cemetery—a group of eight, ten, or more tombs, obviously answering to the number of families or branches of the clan. In the construction of the tombs, and in the offerings contained, we note at once differences between different cemeteries and uniformity in the tombs of the same group. The richest cemeteries lie nearer the acropolis, as the stronger clans would naturally dwell nearer the king. Thus, for its population, Mycenæ covered a large area, but its limits were not sharply defined, and the transition from the citadel centre to the open country was not abrupt. The villages were linked together by graveyards, gardens and fields, highways and squares; thus the open settlement was indeed a πόλις εὐρυάγυια—a town of broad ways.

Somewhat such must have been the aspect in primitive days of Sparta and Athens, not to mention many other famous cities. Indeed, even in historic times, as we know from the ruins, Sparta was still made up of detached villages spread over a large territory for so small a population. So, primitive Athens was composed of the central settlement on the Acropolis, with the villages encircling it from Pnyx to Lycabettus and back again. When the city was subsequently walled in, some of these villages were included in the circuit, others were left outside, while still others (as the Ceramicus) were cut in two by the wall. The same thing happened at Mycenæ; the town wall was built simply because the fortress was an insufficient shelter for the populace as times grew threatening; but it could not, and did not, take in all the villages.

Such, briefly, is the objective evidence—the palpable facts—pointing to a race connection between the Mycenæans and the Greeks of history. We have, finally, to consider the testimony of the Homeric poems. Homer avowedly sings of heroes and peoples who had flourished in Greece long before his own day. Now it may be denied that these represent the civilisation known to us as Mycenæan; but it is certainly a marvellous coincidence (as Schuchhardt[h] observes) that “excavations invariably confirm the former power and splendour of every city which is mentioned by Homer as conspicuous for its wealth or sovereignty.”

Of all the cities of Hellas, it is the now established centres of Mycenæan culture which the poet knows best and characterises with the surest hand. Mycenæ “rich in gold” is Agamemnon’s seat, and Agamemnon is lord of all Argos and many isles, and leader of the host at Troy. In Laconia, in the immediate neighbourhood of the tomb which has given us the famous Vaphio cups, is the royal seat of Menelaus, which is likened to the court of Olympian Zeus. Bœotian Orchomenos, whose wealth still speaks for itself in the Treasury of Minyas, is taken by the poet as a twin type of affluence with Egyptian Thebes, “where the treasure-houses are stored fullest.” Assuredly, no one can regard all this and many another true touch as mere coincidence. The poet knows whereof he affirms. He has exact knowledge of the greatness and bloom of certain peoples and cities at an epoch long anterior to his own, with which the poems have to do. And there is not one hint in either poem that these races and heroes were not of the poet’s own kin.

It might be assumed that there had once ruled in those cities an alien people, and that the monuments of Mycenæan culture were their legacy to us, but that the Achæans who came after them have entered into the inheritance of their fame. Such usurpations there have been in history; but the hypothesis is out of the question here. At Mycenæ, where exploration has been unusually thorough, the genuine Mycenæan Age is seen to have come to a sharp and sudden end—a catastrophe so overwhelming that we cannot conceive of any lingering bloom. Had the place passed to a people worthy to succeed to the glory of the race who reared its mighty walls and vaulted tombs, then we should look for remains of a different but not a contemptible civilisation. But, in fact, we find built directly on the ruins of the Mycenæan palace mean and shabby huts which tell us how the once golden city was succeeded by a paltry village. Centuries were to pass before the Doric temple rose on the accumulated ruins of palace and hovels, and generations more before the brave little remnant returned with the laurels of Platæa and enough of the spoil (we may conjecture) to put the walls of the Atreidæ in repair.

If the structures peculiar to the Mycenæan age are the work of foreigners, what have we left for Agamemnon and his Achæans? Simply the hovels. Of the Dipylon pottery, with which it is proposed to endow them, there is none worth mentioning at Mycenæ, very little at Tiryns, hardly a trace at Amyclæ, or Orchomenos. In the Mycenæan acropolis, particularly, very few fragments of this pottery have been found, and that mainly in the huts already mentioned. Can these be the sole traces of the power and pride of the Atreidæ?

For us at least the larger problem of nationality is solved; but there is a further question. Can we determine the race or races among the Greeks known to history to whom the achievements of Mycenæan civilisation are to be ascribed? In this inquiry we may set aside the Dorians, although many scholars (especially among the Germans) still claim for them the marvellous remains of the Argolid. The Homeric poems, they say, describe a state of things subsequent to the Dorian migration into the Peloponnesus and consequent upon the revolution thereby effected. As the Dorians themselves hold sway at Mycenæ and Sparta, they must be the subjects of the poet’s song—the stately fabric of Mycenæan culture must be the work of their hands.

On the other hand, Beloch,[i] while accepting the Dorian theory of this civilisation, dismisses the traditional Dorian migration as a myth, and maintains that Dorian settlement in the Peloponnesus was as immemorial as the Arcadian. Just as the original advent of the Arcadians in the district which bears their name had faded out of memory and left no trace of a tradition, so the actual migration of the Dorians belonged to an immemorial past.

The first of these views which attributes the Mycenæan culture to the Dorians of the traditional migration, cannot stand the test of chronology. For tradition refers that migration to the end of the twelfth century B.C., whereas the Mycenæan people were established in the Argolid before the sixteenth, probably even before the twentieth century. While Beloch’s hypothesis is not beset with this chronological difficulty, it is otherwise quite untenable. For, as the excavations at Tiryns and Mycenæ abundantly prove, the Mycenæan civilisation perished in a great catastrophe. The palaces of both were destroyed by fire after being so thoroughly pillaged that scarcely a single bit of metal was left in the ruins. Further, they were never rebuilt; and the sumptuous halls of Mycenæ were succeeded by the shabby hovels of which we have spoken. The larger domes at Mycenæ, whose sites were known, were likewise plundered—in all probability by the same hands that fired the palace. This is evidenced by the pottery found in the hovels and before the doorways of two of the beehive tombs. A similar catastrophe appears to have cut short the career of this civilisation in the other centres where it had flourished.

How are we to account for this sudden and final overthrow otherwise than by assuming a great historic crisis, which left these mighty cities with their magnificent palaces only heaps of smoking ruins? And what other crisis can this have been than the irruption of the Dorians? And their descent into the Peloponnesus is traditionally dated at the very time which other considerations have led us to fix as the lower limit of the Mycenæan Age. Had that migration never been recorded by the ancients nor attested by the state of the Peloponnesus in historic times, we should still be led to infer it from the facts now put in evidence by the archæologist’s spade.

Setting aside the Dorian claim as preposterous, we have nothing to do but follow the epic tradition. The Homeric poems consistently assume that prior to any Dorian occupation Argolis was inhabited by other peoples, and notably by Achæans whose position is so commanding that the whole body of Greeks before Troy usually go by their name. Their capital is Mycenæ, and their monarch Agamemnon, King of Men; although we find them also in Laconia under the rule of Menelaus. But the poet has other names, hardly less famous, applied now to the people of Argolis and now to the Greeks at large. One of these names (Ἀργεῖοι) is purely geographical, whether it be restricted to the narrow Argolid district or extended to the wider Argos, and has no special ethnological significance. But the other (Δαναοί) belonged to a people distinct from and, according to uniform tradition, more ancient than the Achæans. We find, then, two races in Argolis before the Dorian migration, each famous in song and story, and each so powerful that its name may stand for all the inhabitants of Greece. The Achæans occupy Mycenæ, that is to say, the northern mountain region of the district, while legend represents the Danaans as inseparably connected with Argos and the sea-board, and ascribes to them certain works of irrigation.

Gallery in the Wall around the Citadel of Tiryns

Whatever interpretation be put upon the myth, it seems clear that Argos could not feed its great cities without artificial irrigation, and this it owed to Danaus and his fifty daughters, “who were condemned perpetually to pour water in a tub full of holes,”—that is to say, into irrigation ditches which the thirsty soil kept draining dry.

Now our study of the Mycenæan remains has already constrained us to distinguish in the Argolid two strata of Mycenæan peoples, one of them originally dwelling on dry land in sunken huts, the other occupying pile settlements in lakes and swamps. And since tradition squares so remarkably with the facts in evidence, may we not venture to identify the marsh-folk with the Danaans and the landsmen with the Achæans?

But Achæans and Dorians were not alone in shaping and sharing Mycenæan culture; they had their congeners in other regions. Foremost among these were the Minyan founders of Orchomenos. As lake-dwellers and hydraulic engineers they are assimilated to the Danaans, whose near kinsmen they may have been, as the primitive islanders, whose abode we have found copied in the stone vases, must have been related to them both. Tradition has, in fact, preserved an account of the colonisation of Thera by a people coming from Bœotia, although it is uncertain whether it refers to the original occupation or to a settlement subsequent to the great catastrophe.

From the Danao-Minyan stock, it would appear that the Achæans parted company at an early date and continuing for a time in a different—most probably a mountainous—country, there took on ways of living proper to such environment. Later than the Danaans, according to the consistent testimony of tradition, they came down into the Peloponnesus and by their superior vigour and prowess prevailed over the older stock.

To these two branches of the race we may refer the two classes of tombs. The beehive and chamber tombs, as we have seen, have their prototype in the sunken huts: they belong to the Achæans coming down from the colder north. The shaft-graves are proper to the Danaan marsh-men. At Tiryns we find a shaft-grave, but no beehive or chamber tomb. At Orchomenos the Treasury of Minyas stands alone in its kind against at least eight tholoi and sixty chamber-tombs at Mycenæ. Hence, wherever this type of tombs abounds we may infer that an Achæan stock had its seat, as at Pronoia, in Attica, Thessaly, and Crete. Against this it may be urged that precisely at the Achæan capital, and within its acropolis at that, we find the famous group of shaft-graves with their precious offerings, as well as humbler graves of the same type outside the circle. But this, in fact, confirms our view when we remember it was the Danaid Perseus who founded Mycenæ and that his posterity bore rule there until the sceptre passed to Achæan hands in the persons of the Pelopidæ.[5] We have noted the close correspondence of the original fortress at Mycenæ with that of Tiryns, and its subsequent enlargement. Coincident with this extension of the citadel, the new type of tomb makes its appearance in the great domes,—some of them certainly royal sepulchres,—although the grave-circle of the acropolis is but half occupied. That circle, however, ceases thenceforth to be used as a place of burial, while the humbler graves adjacent to it are abandoned and built over with dwellings. With the new type of tomb we note changes of burial customs, not to be accounted for on chronological grounds: in the beehive tombs the dead are never embalmed, nor do they wear masks, nor are they laid on pebble beds—a practice which may have owed its origin to the wet ground about Tiryns.

There is but one theory on which these facts can be fully explained. It is that of a change in the ruling race and dynasty, and it clears up the whole history of Mycenæ and the Argive Plain. The first Greek settlers occupied the marshy sea-board, where they established themselves at Tiryns and other points; later on, when they had learned to rear impregnable walls, many of them migrated to the mountains which dominated the plain and thus were founded the strongholds of Larissa, Midea, and Mycenæ.

But while the Danaans were thus making their slow march to the north the Achæans were advancing southward from Corinth—a base of great importance to them then and always, as we may infer from the network of Cyclopean highways between it and their new centre. At Mycenæ, already a strong Perseid outpost, the two columns meet—when, we cannot say. But about 1500 B.C., or a little later, the Achæans had made themselves masters of the place and imposed upon it their own kings.

We have no tradition of any struggle in connection with this dynastic revolution, and it appears probable that the Achæans did not expel the older stock. On the contrary, they scrupulously respected the tombs of the Danaid dynasty—it may be, because they felt the claim of kindred blood. In manners and culture there could have been but little difference between them, for the Achæans had already entered the strong current of Mycenæan civilisation.

Indeed, we discern a reciprocal influence of the two peoples. Within certain of the Achæan tombs (as we may now term the beehives and rock chambers) we find separate shaft-graves, obviously recalling the Danaid mode of burial. On the other hand, it would appear that the typical Achæan tomb was adopted by the ruling classes among other Mycenæan peoples. Otherwise we cannot explain the existence of isolated tombs of this kind as at Amyclæ (Vaphio), Orchomenos, and Menidi—obviously the sepulchres of regal or opulent families; while the common people of these places—of non-Achæan stock—buried their dead in the ordinary oblong pits.

Achæan ascendency is so marked that the Achæan name prevails even where that stock forms but an inconsiderable element of the population. Notably this is true of Laconia, where the rare occurrence of the beehive tomb goes to show that the pre-Dorian inhabitants were mostly descended from the older stock, which we have encountered at Tiryns and at Orchomenos.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[3] [Reprinted, by permission of the publishers, from the article “Mycenæan Civilisation,” by D. G. Hogarth, in the New Volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Copyright, 1902, by The Encyclopædia Britannica Company.]

[4] Helbig,[f] Die Italiker in der Pœbene, p. 11; cf. Pigorini[g] in Atti dell’ Accad. dei Lincei, viii. 265 ff.

[5] This is not gainsaying the Phrygian extraction of the Pelopid line. “The true Phrygians were closely akin to the Greeks, quite as closely akin as the later Macedonians. We may fairly class the Pelopidæ as Achæan.” (Percy Gardner,[e] New Chapters of Greek History, p. 84.)

Restoration of a Mycenæan Palace

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