In seven or eight of the shafts sunk in the upper citadel I brought to light Cyclopean house-walls built on the natural rock, and in three shafts I found Cyclopean water-conduits of a primitive sort, being composed of unwrought stones, laid without any binding material. Though these water-conduits rest on the rock, yet I cannot conceive how water can ever have run along them without getting lost through the interstices between the stones.
Neither in the long trench nor in the deep twelve or thirteen shafts did I find any stones at all. I conclude from this that the majority of the houses consisted of unburnt bricks, which still form the building material of most of the villages in the Argolid. The houses can hardly have been of wood, for, if so, I should have found large quantities of ashes. All my excavations in Tiryns remain of course open, and visitors are invited to inspect them.
COWS OF TERRA-COTTA.
Among the objects discovered I must first mention the small terra-cotta cows, of which I collected eleven,[50] for they seem to solve a great problem, and are, at all events, of capital importance to science. Nearly all of them are covered with painted ornaments of red colour; one only has a black ornamentation.
No. 2. Terra-Cotta Cow, from Tiryns. (1½ M.) Actual size.
IDOLS OF HERA.
At the same time I found nine female idols, seven of which are painted with red and two with black or dark yellow ornaments.[51] They have a very compressed face, no mouth, and a "polos" on the head; of the idol No. 8 the head is missing, and the idol, No. 10, has a broader face and an uncovered head. The breasts of all these idols are in high relief, and below them on each side protrudes a long horn, in such a way that both horns together must either be intended to represent the moon's crescent or the two horns of the cow, or both the one and the other at the same time. I found cows and idols perfectly similar, three years ago, in the thirty-four shafts I sank in the Acropolis of Mycenæ, which city was close to the great Heræum and was celebrated for its cultus of Hera, whose cow-character and identity with the Pelasgic moon and cow-goddess Io, with the Bœotian goddess Demeter Mycalessia, and with the Egyptian moon-goddess Isis,[52] I have already sufficiently proved.[53] My opinion is also shared by the high authority of the Right Honourable W. E. Gladstone, who says in his celebrated work, 'Homeric Synchronism,' p. 249: "The goddess Isis, mated with Osiris, is represented with the cow's head on some of the Egyptian monuments.[54] She is identified by Herodotus with Demeter: but Demeter and Herè are very near, and Herè seems in Homer to be the Hellenic form which had in a great degree extruded Demeter from many of her traditions, and relegated her into the insignificance which belongs to her in the poems. The epithet Boöpis seems therefore possibly to indicate a mode of representing Herè which had been derived from Egypt, and which Hellenism refined.
