THREE BODIES IN THE TOMB.
The three bodies of this tomb lay with their heads to the east and their feet to the west; all three were of large proportions, and appeared to have been forcibly squeezed into the small space of only 5 ft. 6 in. which was left for them between the inner walls. The bones of the legs, which are almost uninjured, are unusually large. Although the head of the first man, from the south side, was covered with a massive golden mask, his skull crumbled away on being exposed to the air, and only a few bones could be saved besides those of the legs. The same was the case with the second body, which had been plundered in antiquity.
But of the third body, which lay at the north end of the tomb, the round face, with all its flesh, had been wonderfully preserved under its ponderous golden mask; there was no vestige of hair, but both eyes were perfectly visible, also the mouth, which, owing to the enormous weight that had pressed upon it, was wide open, and showed thirty-two beautiful teeth. From these, all the physicians who came to see the body were led to believe that the man must have died at the early age of thirty-five. The nose was entirely gone. The body having been too long for the space between the two inner walls of the tomb, the head had been pressed in such a way on the breast, that the upper part of the shoulders was nearly in a horizontal line with the vertex of the head. Notwithstanding the large golden breast-plate, so little had been preserved of the breast, that the inner side of the spine was visible in many places. In its squeezed and mutilated state, the body measured only 2 ft. 4½ in. from the top of the head to the beginning of the loins; the breadth of the shoulders did not exceed 1 ft. 1¼ in., and the breadth of the chest 1 ft. 3 in.; but the large thigh-bones could leave no doubt regarding the real proportions of the body. Such had been the pressure of the débris and stones, that the body had been reduced to a thickness of 1 in. to 1½ in. The colour of the body resembled very much that of an Egyptian mummy. The forehead was ornamented with a plain round leaf of gold, and a still larger one was lying on the right eye; I further observed a large and a small gold leaf on the breast below the large golden breast-cover, and a large one just above the right thigh.
No. 454. The upper part of a Body found in the First Tomb. From an Oil Painting made directly after its discovery.
A WELL PRESERVED HUMAN BODY.
The news that the tolerably well preserved body of a man of the mythic heroic age had been found, covered with golden ornaments, spread like wildfire through the Argolid, and people came by thousands from Argos, Nauplia, and the villages to see the wonder. But, nobody being able to give advice how to preserve the body, I sent for a painter to get at least an oil-painting made, for I was afraid that the body would crumble to pieces. Thus I am enabled to give a faithful likeness of the body, as it looked after all the golden ornaments had been removed. But to my great joy, it held out for two days, when a druggist from Argos, Spiridon Nicolaou by name, rendered it hard and solid by pouring on it alcohol, in which he had dissolved gum-sandarac. As there appeared to be no pebbles below it it was thought that it would be possible to lift it on an iron plate; but this was a mistake, because it was soon discovered that there was the usual layer of pebbles below the body, and all of these having been more or less pressed into the soft rock by the enormous weight which had been lying for ages upon them, all attempts made to squeeze in the iron plate below the pebble-stones, so as to be able to lift them together with the body, utterly failed. There remained, therefore, no other alternative than to cut a small trench into the rock all round the body, and make thence a horizontal incision, so as to cut out a slab, two inches thick, to lift it with the pebble-stones and the body, to put it upon a strong plank, to make around the latter a strong box, and to send this to the village of Charvati, whence it will be forwarded to Athens as soon as the Archæological Society shall have got a suitable locality for the Mycenean antiquities. With the miserable instruments alone available here it was no easy task to detach the large slab horizontally from the rock, but it was still much more difficult to bring it in the wooden box from the deep sepulchre to the surface, and to transport it on men's shoulders for more than a mile to Charvati. But the capital interest which this body of the remote heroic age has for science, and the buoyant hope of preserving it, made all the labour appear light.[354]
