The Sea-Kings of Crete. James Baikie
found Agamemnon and his household. For a time this view and his enthusiastic advocacy of it gained the ear of the public; but gradually it became apparent that the disorder of the graves and the condition of the corpses was due, not to hasty interment, but to the collapse of the roofs of the graves; the grave furniture was shown not to belong by any means entirely to one period; and the number and sex of the persons interred did not agree with the legend, or with the account of Pausanias. Admiration turned to incredulity, and even to undeserved ridicule of the enthusiastic explorer; but the lapse of time has made critics less inclined to mock at Schliemann's eager belief, and it is largely conceded now that while perhaps the tombs may not be actually those of the great King of the Achæans and his friends, they are at least those which were long held to be such by tradition, and which Pausanias intended to denote by his descriptions. In any case, the question of whether the explorer discovered the body of one dead King or of another is of entirely minor importance. To find Agamemnon would have been a romantic exploit thoroughly in accordance with the bent of Schliemann's mind, and a fitting crown to a life which in itself was the very romance of exploration. But Schliemann had done something infinitely more important than to make the find of a dead King, even though that King had reigned for more than two and a half millenniums in the greatest poem of the world; he had begun the resurrection of a dead civilization.
Besides the great discovery of the Shaft-Graves, Schliemann carried on the exploration of the famous beehive tombs in the lower city of Mycenæ. One of these, the largest, was already well known by the name of the 'Treasury of Atreus' (Plate V. 2). It consists of a long entrance passage running back into the hillside, and leading to a great vaulted chamber excavated out of the hill, and shaped like a beehive. The entrance passage is 20 feet broad and 115 feet long, and is lined on either side with walls of massive masonry which increase in height as the hill rises. This passage leads to a vertical façade 46 feet high, pierced by a door between 17 and 18 feet in height, which was bordered by columns carrying a cornice, above which was a triangular relieving space, masked by slabs of red porphyry adorned with spiral decorations, while the whole façade appears to have been enriched with bronze ornaments and coloured marbles. The massive lintel of the door is 29 feet 6 inches long, 16 feet 6 inches deep, and 3 feet 4 inches high, with a weight of about 120 tons—a mass of stone fairly comparable with some of the gigantic blocks in which Egyptian architects delighted. It is, for instance, about ten tons heavier than the quartzite block which forms the sepulchral chamber in the pyramid of Amenemhat III. at Hawara. The great chamber of the tomb consists of an impressive circular vault 48 feet in diameter and in height. Its construction is not that of true vaulting; but each of the thirty-three courses projects a little beyond the one below it, until at last they approach closely at the apex, which is closed by a single slab. The courses, after being laid, were hewn to a perfectly smooth curve, and carefully polished, and it appears that the whole of the dome was decorated with rosettes of bronze, a scheme of adornment which recalls the bronze walls of the Palace of Alcinous. From the great chamber a side door, bearing traces of rich decoration, leads to a square room, 27 feet square by 19 feet high, which may possibly have been the actual place of interment. Curtius found 'this lofty and solemn vault' the most imposing of all the monuments of ancient Greece.
In the same hillside as the Treasury of Atreus, but some 400 yards north of it, stands the tomb known as the 'Tomb of Klytemnestra,' or 'Mrs. Schliemann's Treasury'—the latter title being due to the fact that it was partially excavated in 1876 by Dr. Schliemann's wife. In size it very closely corresponds to the better known tomb, while its columns of dark green alabaster, its door-lintel of leek-green marble, and the slabs of red marble which closed the relieving triangle above the door show that it had been not less magnificent than its neighbour.
THE LONG GALLERY, KNOSSOS (p. 68)
Following up his excavations at Mycenæ, Schliemann, in 1880–81, excavated at Orchomenos in Bœotia the so-called 'Treasury of Minyas,' discovering in its square side-chamber a beautiful ceiling formed of slabs of slate sculptured with an exquisite pattern of rosettes and spirals, which shows very distinct traces of Egyptian artistic influence (unless, as Mr. H. R. Hall has now come to believe, we are to trace the origin of the spiral as a decorative motive, not to Egypt, but to the Minoans of Crete). At Tiryns, Schliemann began in 1884 another series of excavations which laid bare the whole ground-plan of the citadel palace of that ancient fortress town with its halls and separate apartments for men and women, and the colossal enclosing wall, in some parts 57 feet thick, with its towers and galleries and chambers constructed in the thickness of the wall (Plate V. 1). The palace revealed evidences of considerable skill in the decorative arts. A beautiful frieze of alabaster carved in rosettes and palmettes, inlaid with blue paste, made plain what Homer meant when he wrote of the Palace of Alcinous: 'Brazen were the walls which ran this way and that from the threshold to the inmost chamber, and round them was a frieze of blue' (kuanos); while fresco paintings in several of the rooms exhibited the spiral and rosette decoration of Orchomenos and Egypt. But perhaps the most interesting find was the remains of a great wall-painting in which a mighty bull is represented charging at full speed, while an athlete, clinging to the monster's horn with one hand, vaults over his back—a picture which is the first important example of the now well-known and numerous set of similar representations which have given us a clue to something of the meaning of the old legend of the man-destroying Minotaur and his tribute of human victims.
Schliemann's discoveries, notwithstanding all the incredulity aroused by his sometimes rather headlong enthusiasm, created an extraordinary amount of interest among scholars and students of early European culture. It was felt at once that he had brought the world face to face with facts which must profoundly modify all opinions hitherto held as to the origins of Greek civilization; for the advanced and fully ripened art which was disclosed, especially in the wonderful finds from the Shaft- or Circle-Graves, stood on an entirely different plane from any art which had hitherto been associated with the early age of Greece; and it was evident, not only that the date at which civilization began to reveal itself in Hellas must be pushed back several centuries, but also that the great differences between the mature Mycenæan art and the infant art of Greece required explanation. To the discoverer himself, the supreme interest of his finds always lay in the thought that they were the direct prototypes, if not the actual originals, of the civilization described in the Homeric poems; but to the question whether this was so or not, a question interesting in itself, but largely academic, there succeeded a much more important one. Here was proof of the existence of a civilization, obviously great and long-enduring, whose products could not be identified with those of any other art known to exist. To what race of men were the achievements of this early culture to be ascribed, and what relation did they hold to the Hellenes of history?
The work of Schliemann was continued and extended by successors such as Dörpfeld, Tsountas, Mackenzie, and others, and by the end of the nineteenth century it had become apparent that the culture of which the first important traces had been found at Mycenæ had extended to some extent over all Hellas, but chiefly over the south-eastern portion of the mainland and over the Cyclades. The principal find-spots in Greece proper were in the Argolid and in Attica; but, besides these, abundant material was discovered at Enkomi (Cyprus) and at Phylâkopi (Melos), while from Vaphio, near Amyklæ in Laconia, there came, among other treasures, a pair of most wonderful gold cups, whose workmanship surpassed anything that could have been imagined of such an early period, and is only to be matched by the goldsmith work of the Renaissance. Hissarlik, under Dr. Dörpfeld's hands, yielded from the Sixth City the evidence of an Asiatic civilization truly contemporaneous with that of Mycenæ. Even before the end of the century it became apparent that Crete was destined to prove a focus of this early culture, and the promise, as we shall see later, has been more than fulfilled. In Egypt Professor Petrie found deposits of prehistoric Ægean pottery in the Delta, the Fayum, and even in Middle Egypt, proving that this civilization, whatever its origin, had been in contact with the ancient civilization of the Nile Valley, while even in the Western Mediterranean, in Sicily particularly, in Italy, Sardinia, and Spain, finds, less plentiful, but quite unmistakable, bore witness