The Sea-Kings of Crete

ys, was born on January 6, 1822, at Neu Buckow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He was the son of a clergyman who himself had a deep love for the great tales of an

mained of the ancient splendours of Ilium. He found it impossible to believe that the massive fortifications of Troy had vanished without leaving a trace of their existence. When his father admitted that the walls were once as huge as those depicted in his history book, but asserted that th

w had its story of a robber knight who had buried his favourite child there in a golden cradle; and near by was the old castle of Henning von Holstein, who, when besieged by the Duke of Mecklenburg, had buried his treasures close to the keep of his stronghold. On such romantic legends Schliemann's young

op. Even in such circumstances his passion for the Homeric story found means, sufficiently quaint, for its gratification. There came one evening to the shop a miller's man, who had been well educated, but had fallen into poor circumstances, and had taken to drink, yet even in his degradation had not forgotten his Homer. 'That evening,' says Schliemann, 'he recited to us about a hundred lines of the poet, observing the rhythmic cadence of the verse

the next, and incidentally to save for intellectual purposes one half of his salary of 800 francs. The mental training of the first year enabled him to learn Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese with much greater rapidity, each language being acquired in six weeks. In 1846 he was sent by another firm as their agent to St. Petersburg, where in the next year he founded a business house of his own, and from that time all went well with him. The

GE IN WALL,

EASURY OF ATREUS

t the Greek traveller, Pausanias, was right in stating that the murdered Agamemnon and his kin were buried within the walls of the Acropolis at Mycen?, and not without it. In both these opinions he ran counter to the prevailing views of his time. It

nd quite close to the gate there was discovered the famous 'Treasure of Priam,' so called, a considerable mass of vessels and ornaments in gold and silver, with a number of spearheads, axes, daggers, and cups, wrought in copper. As the excavations progressed, it became evident that not one city, but many cities, had stood upon this ancient site. The First City, reached, of course, at the lowest level of the excavation, immediately above t

is, with its projecting towers, had evidently once formed the enclosure of an Acropolis; and within the wall lay the remains of a large building which appeared to have been a house or palace. The separate finds included the great treasure already mentioned, and numerous other articles of use and adornment, golden hair-pins, bracelets, ear-pendants, a very primitive leaden idol of f

elong to the very early period of the Burnt City; but subsequent discoveries, particularly those of Mr. Seager on the little island of Mokhlos, off the coast of Crete, have paralleled the splendour of the Trojan treasure with work which is undoubtedly of the same early date as the Second City, so that Schliemann's accuracy has been confirmed in this instance. The citadel itself seemed far too small to fill the place which Troy occupies in Homer's description, even allowing for poetic exaggeration. In 1890, the year of his death, Schliemann was on the way to the solution of the problem, and in 1892, his coadjutor, Professor D?rpfeld, finally proved that the Sixth City, lying four strata above Schliemann's Troy, was the true Ilion of the great epic. Its wider circuit had been missed by Schliemann in his earlier excavations owing to the fact that, at the centre of the site where he was working, the débris had been planed and levelled away by the Romans to make room for the buildings of their New Iliu

ancient citadel of Agamemnon stands in the plain of Argos, on an isolated hill 912 feet in height. Before Schliemann turned his attention to it, it was already well known to students of arch?ology from the remains of its walls, and particularly from the splendid Lion Gate (Plate IV.) with its famous relief of the sacred pillar supported by two colossal lions, and from the great beehive tombs of the lower city-the so-called 'Treasuries.' But the chief thing which drew the explorer to Mycen? was not these remains; it was the statement of Pausanias already referred to. 'Some remains of the circuit wall,' says Pausanias, 'are still to be seen, and the gate which has lions over it. These were built, they say, by the

t upon the exact spot which he sought, and had even almost exactly proportioned his pit to the area within which the treasures lay. After only a few days' digging, slabs of stone, vertically placed, began to come to light, and before long a complete double ring of stone slabs, 87 feet in diameter, was disclosed (Plate II. 2). Schliemann's

rock-hewn graves. The graves were rectangular, varied in depth from 10 to 16 feet, and ranged in size from 9 by 10 feet to 16 by 22 feet. They had been carefully lined with a wall of small quarry-stones and clay, and roofed over with slate slabs; but the roofing had broken down, owing to the decay of the beams which supported it, and

ARER, KNOS

os,' by Arthur J. Evans

e grave alone contained no fewer than sixty swords and daggers; another, in which women only were buried, held six diadems, fifteen pendants, eleven neck-coils, eight hair ornaments, ten gold grasshoppers with gold chains, one butterfly, four griffins, four lions, ten ornaments, each consisting of two stags, ten with representations of two lions at

maintained in his works, that he had 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 b

ove which was a triangular relieving space, masked by slabs of red porphyry adorned with spiral decorations, while the whole fa?ade 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

ing 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 alab

LLERY, KNOS

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 fr

ood 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 Mycen?an 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 ori

at Phylakopi (Melos), while from Vaphio, near Amykl? 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. D?rpfeld's hands, yielded from the Sixth City the evidence of an Asiatic civilization truly contemporaneous with that of Mycen?. Even before the end of the century it became apparent that Crete was destined to prove a fo

, and culminating towards the close of the age of Bronze in a culture more fecund and more refined than any we are to find again in the same lands till the age of Iron was far advanced. Man in Hellas was more highly civilized before history than when history begins to record his state; and there e

h, 'Authority and A

had been accustomed to think of Greek civilization as having its beginning not so very long before the First Olympiad. It has been fully justified, however, by the event, and it may now be accepted as an established fact that the earliest civiliza

view of students of the ?gean problem. It is no longer held that they contributed anything original to the development of Mycen?an culture, and even as middlemen the tendency is to allow them an influence far smaller than was once held to be theirs. It has become manifest that, in at least the case of Crete and Egypt, communication need not have been through Ph?nician media at all, but was far more probably direct. And with regard to the whole question of the debt owed to the East by this early European civilization, it is probable that the ?gean gave quite as much as

hich he found were actually those of Agamemnon and his fellow-victims in the dark tragedy of Mycen?, but of whether the people and the civilization whose remains have been brought to light are, or are not, the people a

. To Homer, 'golden,' 'broad-wayed' Mycen? is the seat of the great leader of all the Ach?ans, the King of men, Agamemnon; it is also the chief seat of the culture which goes by its name. Orchomenos, Pylos, Laced?mon, Attica, all prominent in the poems, are also well-known seats of Mycen?an civilization. Crete, whose prominent position in the Homeric world has been already referred to, we shall shortly see to have been in point of fact the supre

vestibule; the ante-chamber; the hall, with its fireplace and its pillars; the bathroom, with passage from the hall; the upper story, sometimes containing the women's quarters; the spaciousness; the decoration; even the furniture, have been most wonderfully identified at Tiryns and Mycen?, an

ations have been found in such profusion among the Mycen?an relics. We are told, for example, that on the brooch of Odysseus was represented a hound holding a writhing fawn between its forepaws, and we have the elaborate workmanship of the cup of Nestor-'a right goodly cup, that the old man brought from home, embossed with studs of gold, and four handles there were to it, and round each two golden doves were feeding, and to the cup were two bottoms. Another man could scarce have lifted the cup from the ta

is the technique that is of interest. The picture is made up out of various metals inlaid on a thin bronze plate, which is let into the dagger-blade. The lions and the bare skin of the men are inlaid in gold, the loin-cloths and the shields are of silver, all the accessories, such as shield-straps and the patterns on the loin-cloths, are given in a dark substance, while the ground is coated with a dark enamel to give relief to the figures. The hunting-cat scene, which presents remarkable resemblances to a well-known scene from a wall-painting at Thebes, represents cats hunting wild-fowl in a marsh intersected by a winding river, in which fish are swimming and papyrus plants growing. 'T

y of identification, presupposing, as it does, a different view of the destiny of the soul after death. The men who burned the bodies of their dead believed that the soul had no further use for its body after death, but departed into a distant, shadowy, immaterial region, so that the body, if it had any connection with the soul, acted rather as a drag and a defilement, from which it was well that the soul should be released. Therefore they dematerialized the body, and often the thing

n?an graves at Salamis evidences of cremation are found, and at Mouliana, in Crete, there are instances of uncremated bones being found along with bronze swords on one side of a tomb, while on the other were found an iron sword and cremated bones in a cinerary urn. The distinction, then, is not necessarily one of race, but of custom, gradually changing, perhaps

en?an tombs iron appears in the shape of finger-rings; and in East Cretan tombs of the latest Minoan period iron swords have been found. And if, as is generally agreed, the Homeric poems represent the work of several bards covering a considerable period of time, there is nothing out of the way in the supposition that, while the earlier writers represented bronze as the material for weapons, because it was actually so in their time, the later ones, writing at a period when iron was largely superseding, bu

irass, and a comparatively small round shield. But, again, in later Mycen?an work, such as the famous Warrior Vase, there is evidence of the use of the small round shield, while, moreover, in some parts of the poem there are evidences of the use of the true Mycen?an shield 'like a tower.' Periphetes of Mycen? is slain by Hector owing to his having tripped over the lower edge of his great shield, and hi

like that which succeeded it, subversive of the great culture that belonged to the conquered Mycen?an race; on the contrary, the invaders entered into and became partakers of it, carrying on its traditions until the gradual decay, which had begun already before they made their appearance in Greece, was terminated by the Dorian invasion, or whatever process of gradual incursion by ruder tribes may correspond to what the later Greeks called by that name. And it is this last stage of the Mycen?an culture, still existing, though under Ach?an supremacy, which is depicted in

owne, 'Homeric Stu