Mycenæ: a narrative of researches and discoveries at Mycenæ and Tiryns

by Heinrich Schliemann

THE AUTHOR'S FAITH IN THE TROJAN WAR.

However, the want of ornamentation on the Trojan jewels, the hand-made uncoloured pottery with impressed or engraved ornamentation, and, finally, the want of iron and glass, convinced me that the ruins of Troy belong to such a remote antiquity, as to precede by ages the ruins of Mycenæ, the date of which I thought I could fix by the result of the 34 shafts which I sank in the Acropolis in February 1874. I therefore believed that Homer had only known the siege and destruction of Troy from an ancient tradition commemorated by preceding poets, and that, for favours received, he introduced his contemporaries as actors in his great tragedy. But I never doubted that a king of Mycenæ, by name Agamemnon, his charioteer Eurymedon, a Princess Cassandra, and their followers had been treacherously murdered either by Ægisthus at a banquet, "like an ox at the manger," as Homer[369] says, or in the bath by Clytemnestra, as the later tragic poets represent;[370] and I firmly believed in the statement of Pausanias,[371] that the murdered persons had been interred in the Acropolis, differing in this respect, as I have said before, from Leake, Dodwell, O. Müller, E. Curtius, Prokesch, and other travellers in the Peloponnesus, who had all misunderstood the statement of Pausanias, and thought that he meant the murdered persons to have been buried in the lower town.

My firm faith in the traditions made me undertake my late excavations in the Acropolis, and led to the discovery of the five tombs, with their immense treasures. Although I found in these tombs a very high civilisation, from a technical point of view, yet, as in Ilium, I found there only hand-made or most ancient wheel-made pottery, and no iron. Further, writing was known in Troy, for I found there a number of short inscriptions, in very ancient Cypriote characters; and, so far as we can judge, in a language which is essentially the same as Greek;[372] whereas we have the certainty now that the alphabet was unknown in Mycenæ. Had it been known, the Mycenean goldsmiths, who were always endeavouring to invent some new ornamentation, would have joyfully availed themselves of the novelty to introduce the strange characters in their decoration. Besides, in the remote antiquity, to which the Homeric rhapsodies and the tradition of the Mycenean tombs refer, there was as yet no commercial intercourse. Nobody travelled, except on warlike or piratical expeditions. Thus there may have been a very high civilisation at Mycenæ, while at the very same time the arts were only in their first dawn in Troy, and writing with Cypriote characters may have been in use in Troy more than 1000 years before any alphabet was known in Greece.

I have not the slightest objection to admit that the tradition which assigns the tombs in the Acropolis to Agamemnon and his companions, who on their return from Ilium were treacherously murdered by Clytemnestra or her paramour Ægisthus, may be perfectly correct and faithful. I am bound to admit this so much the more, as we have the certainty that, to say the least, all the bodies in each tomb had been buried simultaneously. The calcined pebbles below each of them, the marks of the fire to the right and left on the internal walls of the tombs, the undisturbed state of the ashes and the charred wood on and around the bodies, give us the most unmistakable proofs of this fact. Owing to the enormous depths of these sepulchres, and the close proximity of the bodies to each other, it is quite impossible that three or even five funeral piles could have been dressed at different intervals of time in the same tomb.

VERACITY OF THE TRADITION.

The identity of the mode of burial, the perfect similarity of all the tombs, their very close proximity, the impossibility of admitting that three or even five royal personages of immeasurable wealth, who had died a natural death at long intervals of time, should have been huddled together in the same tomb, and, finally, the great resemblance of all the ornaments, which show exactly the same style of art and the same epoch—all these facts are so many proofs that all the twelve men, three women, and perhaps two or three children, had been murdered simultaneously and burned at the same time.

The veracity of the tradition seems further to be confirmed by the deep veneration which the Myceneans and in fact the inhabitants of the whole Argolid, have always shown for these five sepulchres. The funeral pyres were not yet extinguished when they were covered with a layer of clay, and then with a layer of pebbles, on which the earth was thrown at once. To this circumstance chiefly are we indebted for the preservation of so large a quantity of wood and the comparatively good preservation of the bodies; for in no instance were the bones consumed by the fire, and on several bodies, which were covered with golden masks and thick breast-plates, even much of the flesh had remained. The site of each tomb was marked by tombstones, and when these had been covered by the dust of ages and had disappeared, fresh tombstones were erected on the new level, but precisely over the spot where the ancient memorials lay buried. Only on the large fourth sepulchre with the five bodies, instead of new tombstones, a sacrificial altar of almost circular form was built.

As before explained, the first tomb had, according to all appearance, been originally decorated with a large monument, from which came the three tombstones with the bas-reliefs, and these sculptured tombstones must have been taken out and erected on the new level.