The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
stone age had not been quite forgotten; obsidian was still employed for the heads of arrows. But, in general, bronze was used in Greece for all implements throughout this age. The arms with which the men of Mycenae attacked their foes were sword, spear, and bow. Their defensive armor consisted of huge helmets, probably made of leather; shields of ox-hide reaching from the neck almost to the feet—complete towers of defense, but so clumsy that it was the chief part of a military education to manage them. The princes went forth to war in two-horsed war chariots, which consisted of a board to stand on and a breastwork of wicker. The fragment of a silver vessel (found in one of the rock-tombs of Mycenae) shows us a scene of battle in front of the walls of a mountain city, from whose battlements women, watching the fight, are waving their hands. Among the pottery discovered at Mycenae there is a large jar, on one side of which we see a woman looking after six warriors marching forth to battle armed from head to foot, and on the other, less clearly, men engaged in battle—black-brown figures on a yellow ground. On gems and seal-stones we also find representations of armed men. One of the most striking pictures of the warriors of this age is a group of five spearmen on a painted gravestone.
Men wore long hair, not, however, flowing freely, but tied or plaited in tresses. In old times they let the beard grow both on lip and chin; but the fashion changed, and in the later period, as we see from their pictures, they shaved the upper lip, and razors have been found in the tombs. Their garments were simple, a loin apron and a cloak fastened by a clasp-pin; in later times, a close-tunic. High-born dames wore tight bodices and wide gown-skirts. Frontlets or bands round the brow were a distinction of their attire, and they wore their hair high coiled in rings, letting the ends fall behind. The ornaments which have been found in the royal tombs show that the queens of Mycenae appeared in glittering gold array. There is some reason to think that women tattooed their faces.
In the foregoing sketch it has been implied that some monuments are later in date than others. Thus the vaulted sepulchres of the plain have been spoken of as subsequent to the shaft sepulchres on the castle hill of Mycenae. The chief means of establishing a basis for this relative chronology is the development of the potter’s art, and the “Mycenaean” pottery therefore concerns us in so far as it has given a clue for fixing the earlier and later epochs of the civilisation which produced it.
The painted vessels of the second millennium fall into two general classes, unglazed and glazed. The unglazed, ornamented chiefly with lines and spirals, were older, and, when the glazed style attained its perfection, went almost entirely out of use. In the varnished jars, the development of the handicraft from the cruder work of the earlier potters can be traced through the best period into an age of decadence, when the Mycenaean comes into competition with other and newer styles. The colour of these vessels, in the best age, is warm, varying from yellow to dark brown, and sometimes burnt into a rich deep red. A new impulse of decoration has come upon the potters. The ornaments are no longer lines and spirals, but vegetables and animals, especially of the sea kingdom, fishes, polypods, seaweeds. On the other hand, sphinxes, griffins, lotus flowers, and other oriental and Egyptian subjects, though common elsewhere in Mycenaean ornament, are hardly ever copied by the workers in clay. The curious false-necked jars which have no opening above the neck, but a spout at the side, are one of the most characteristic products of the potteries, which we call Mycenaean; though it is not known for certain that Mycenae was itself a centre of the trade.
Other marks for fixing the relative dates of “Mycenaean” troves are stone tools and iron. If, for example, we find in one tomb obsidian spear-heads and no trace of iron, and in another no stone implements but iron rings, it is a safe inference that the first is older than the second. The occurrence of iron is a mark of comparative lateness.
It is by such marks as these that we are able to say that the kings of the shaft graves reigned before the kings who were buried in the vaulted tombs, and that remains which have been found in the island of Thera belong to the beginning of the “Mycenaean age”
The remains at Mycenae and Tiryns are, taken in their entirety, the most impressive of the memorials of a widespread Aegean civilisation. Nowhere else in the Peloponnesus have great fortresses or palaces been found; but some large vaulted hill-tombs, on the same plan as those of the Argive plain, mark the existence of ancient principalities. The lords of Amyclae, which was the queen of the Laconian vale before the rise of Greek Sparta, hollowed out for themselves a lordly tomb, which, unlike the Treasury of Atreus, was never invaded by robbers. In this vault, among other costly treasures, were found the most precious of all the works of Mycenaean art that have yet been drawn forth from the earth two golden cups on which a metal-worker of matchless skill has wrought vivid scenes of the snaring and capturing of wild bulls.
In Attica there are many relics. On the Athenian Acropolis there are a few stones supposed to belong to a palace of great antiquity, but we can look with more certainty on some of the ancient foundations of the fortress wall. This wall was called Pelargic or Pelasgic by the Athenians; and it seems likely that the word preserves the name of the ancient inhabitants of the place, the Pelasgoi. But the Pelasgians of Athens were not the only people of the Athenian plain. Towards the northern end of this plain, a vaulted tomb seems to record ancient princes of Acharnae. The lords of Thoricus had tombs of the same fashion; and at Eleusis there is similar evidence. In many other places in Attica graves of this period have been found; at Prasiae a number of remarkable rock-tombs resembling those in the lower town of Mycenae.
In Thessaly the only important relic yet discovered is a vaulted sepulchre near Pagasae. In Boeotia there are more striking memorials. On the western shores of the great Copaic marsh a people dwelled, whose wealth was proverbial; and their city Orchomenus shared with Mycenae the attribute of “golden” in the Homeric poems. One of their kings built a great sepulchral vault under the hill of the citadel, and later generations took it for a treasury. It approaches, though it does not quite attain to, the size of the Treasure-house of Atreus itself; and it had a second chamber covered by a stone ceiling which was adorned with a curious design in low relief, an arrangement of meandering spirals and fan-shaped leaves bordered by rosettes, producing the effect of a carpet. The same design which decked the burying-place of Orchomenus in stone, was used by the painters of some lord of Tiryns to adorn the walls of his palace; and one is tempted to see both in the ceiling and in the sepulchre itself signs of influence from Argolis. But in any case, the common design of ceiling and painting is borrowed from Egypt, for we find almost the same design on the ceilings of tombs at Egyptian Thebes. The lords of Orchomenus were probably the mightiest lords in Boeotia, but they had neighbours—were they rivals or friends?—in another fastness of the Copaic marsh. While Orchomenus was situated by the western shores, this primeval stronghold was built on a rock rising out of the waters. The ruins of the mighty fortress-walls which girded the edge of the rock are still there, and the foundations of the palace of these island princes; but the name of the place is unknown. To the lords of this nameless castle and to the princes of Orchomenus, the curious habits of their spacious lake were a matter of perpetual concern. The lake or morass which fertilised their land has no river to bear its water to the sea, and its only outlets are underground clefts piercing Mount Ptôon, which rises on its northern banks, a barrier between the lake and the sea. To help the water to reach these passages, men made canals through the lake, and guarded them by fortresses.
Crete shared in the later as in the earlier stages of Aegean civilisations; it too has its fortresses and palaces and beehive tombs, as well as the systems of writing which were its peculiar product. In the Cyclad islands off the Greek coast remains have been found chiefly of the earlier Mycenaean epoch; and their value consists in the light they let in upon the progress of its growth. In Thera, a volcanic upheaval buried and preserved a settlement, of which the excavated houses show us earlier stages of the culture whereof we have seen the bloom in the fortresses of Argolis. In north-eastern Melos a spacious citadel, fortified by a strong wall, has been dug out, on a site which was occupied during a great part of the third millennium, and exhibits the continuity of Aegean civilisations.
At the extreme south-west of the Aegean there was a “Mycenaean” community at the beginning of the fourteenth century—at Ialysus in Rhodes. An old burying-place has been dug out, and revealed horizontal rock-graves with the arrangement of avenue, doorway, and four-sided chamber, resembling those of Mycenae. The vases found here belong to the best kind of Mycenaean glazed