SCHLIEMANN AND HIS WORK
The man whose labours were to give a new impetus to the study of
Greek origins, and to be the beginning of the revelation of an
unknown world of ancient days, 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 antiquity, for
his son has told how his father used often vividly to narrate the
stories of the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and of the
Trojan War. When Schliemann was barely seven years old he received
a present of a child's history of the world, in which the picture
of the destruction of Troy and the flight of Æneas made a profound
impression upon his young mind, and roused in him a passionate desire
to go and see for himself what remained 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
they were now totally destroyed, he retorted: 'Father, if such walls
once existed, they cannot possibly have been completely destroyed;
vast ruins of them must still remain, but they are hidden beneath
the dust of ages.' Already he had made the resolution that some
day he would excavate Troy.
The romance of bygone days and of hidden treasure surrounded the
boy's early years, and no doubt had its own influence in determining
his bent. A pond just behind his father's garden had its legend of
a maiden who rose from its waters each midnight, bearing a silver
bowl. In the village an ancient barrow 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 imagination was nourished. By the time he was ten years old
he had produced a Latin essay on the Trojan War. Such things, which
in another might have been mere childish precocities, were in him
the indications of an enthusiasm for antiquity, which was destined
to be the ruling passion of his whole life.
Yet the beginnings of his career in the world were unromantic to
the last degree. His father's poverty forced him to give up the hope
of a learned life, and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed
to a small grocer in a country village, in whose employment, surely
uncongenial enough for such a spirit, he spent five and a half
years, selling butter, herrings, potato-brandy and the like, and
occupying his spare moments in tidying out the little shop. 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 verses. Although I
did not understand a syllable, the melodious sound of the words
made a deep impression upon me, and I wept bitter tears over my
unhappy fate. Three times over did I get him to repeat to me those
divine verses, rewarding his trouble with three glasses of whisky,
which I bought with the few pence that made up my whole wealth.
From that moment I never ceased to pray God that by His grace I
might yet have the happiness of learning Greek.'
To one whose heart was filled with such a passion for learning, no
obstacle could prove insuperable. Yet for many a day the Fates seemed
most unpropitious. Ill-health drove him to emigrate to Venezuela,
but his ship was wrecked on the Dutch coast, and he became the
errand-boy of a business house in Amsterdam. Here in his first
year of service he managed, while going on his master's errands,
to learn English in the first six months and French in 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 Crimean War brought him
opportunities which he utilized with such ingenuity as to derive
considerable profit from them. By 1858 he considered that the fortune
he had made was sufficient to warrant him in devoting himself entirely
to archæology, and though exceptional circumstances obliged him to
return to business for a little, he finally cut himself loose from
it in 1863, and took up the task which was to occupy the remainder
of his busy life.
[Illustration V: WALLED PASSAGE IN WALL, TIRYNS (_p_. 49)
BEEHIVE TOMB (TREASURY OF ATREUS), MYCENÆ (_p_. 46)]
His Greek studies had led him to two convictions on which his whole
exploring work was based. First, that the site of ancient Troy was on
the spot called in classical days New Ilium, the Hill of Hissarlik,
near the coast of the Ægean; and second, that the Greek traveller,
Pausanias, was right in stating that the murdered Agamemnon and
his kin were buried within the walls of the Acropolis at Mycenæ,
and not without it. In both these opinions he ran counter to the
prevailing views of his time. It was generally believed that, if
Troy had ever any real existence at all, its site was to be looked
for not at Hissarlik, but far inland near Bunarbashi; while the
authority of Pausanias as to the graves of the Atreidæ was held
to be quite unreliable.
Schliemann resolved to put his convictions to the test of actual
excavation. In April, 1870, he cut the first sod of his excavation
at Hissarlik. The work went on with varying, but never brilliant,
fortune, until the year 1873, when his faith and constancy began
at last to meet with their reward. On the south-west of the site
a great city gate was uncovered, lines of wall, already partly
disclosed, began to show themselves more plainly, and 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 the virgin soil, belonged to a very
early stage of human development. Its remains yielded such objects
as stone axes and flint knives, together with the black, hand-made,
polished pottery, known as 'bucchero,' which is characteristic of
Neolithic sites in the Ægean, ornamented frequently with incised
patterns which are filled in with a white chalky substance. The
stratum of débris belonging to the First City averages about 8
feet in depth.
Above this lay a layer of soil about 1 foot 9 inches in depth,
and then, on the top of a great layer of débris, by which the site
had been levelled and extended, came the walls of the Second City.
Here were the remains of a fortified gate with a ramp, paved with
stone, leading up to it (Plate II. 1), and a strong wall of sun-dried
brick resting upon a scarped stone substructure. This, 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 female form, and
abundance of pottery, of which some specimens belong to the class
of vases with long spouts, known to archæologists as 'Schnabelkanne,'
or 'beak-jugs.' Above the stratum of the Second City lay the remains
of no fewer than seven other settlements, more or less clearly
marked, ending at the uppermost layer with the ruins of Roman Ilium,
and its marble temple of Athena.
The gate and walls of the Second City--the fact that it had been
undoubtedly destroyed by fire, and the evidence of wealth and artistic
faculty offered by the golden treasure--seemed to Dr. Schliemann
decisive evidence of the fact that this had been the Ilion of the
Homeric poems. The treasure was named 'Priam's Treasure,' the largest
building, 'Priam's Palace,' and the gate, 'The Scæan Gate.' It
quickly became apparent, however, that the Second City could not
claim Homeric honours, but must be of yet more venerable antiquity.
The style, alike of the city buildings and of the articles found,
was much too primitive for the Homeric period, and pointed to a
date much earlier--probably, indeed, about a thousand years earlier
than that of the Trojan War. The great treasure, whose workmanship
seemed to militate against this conclusion, was suspected to have
somehow slipped down during the excavations from the level of the
Sixth City to that of the Second, as it seemed impossible that such
fine work could belong 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 Dörpfeld, 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 Ilium. The pottery of the Sixth
City was of the type which in the meantime had come to be called
Mycenæan, from the discoveries in the plain of Argos, and its massive
circuit wall, enclosing an area two and a half times greater than
that of the Second City, is quite worthy of the fame of Homeric
Troy. Without much risk of mistake, we may conclude that we have
before us in Plate III. the actual wall from whose summit Andromache
beheld the corpse of the gallant Hector dragged behind the chariot
of his relentless foe. The mere fact of his having to some extent
misinterpreted the evidence of his discoveries can scarcely be
said, however, to take anything from the credit justly due to
Schliemann. Had he been spared for but a year or two longer he
could not have failed to complete his work, and to prove, as his
fellow-worker did, that on the site which he had from the first
contended to be that of Troy, there had stood a large and splendidly
built city, which assuredly belongs to the period of the Trojan War.
The work at Troy, however, had not gone on uninterruptedly between
1870 and Schliemann's death in 1890, and the discoveries which
occupied some of the intervening years were of even greater scientific
importance, though the glamour of romance attaching to the name of
Troy drew perhaps more attention to the work there. A dispute with
the Turkish Government over the disposal of 'Priam's Treasure' led
to obstacles being placed by the Porte in the way of the resumption
of work on the plain of Troy, and in July, 1876, he settled down
to excavate at Mycenæ, the historic capital of the King of men,
Agamemnon, with a view to the proving of his second theory--the
burial of the Atreidæ within the Acropolis of Mycenæ. The 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 archæology 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 Mycenæ 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 Cyclopes,
who made the wall at Tiryns for Proitos. Among the ruins at Mycenæ
is the fountain called Perseia, and some subterranean buildings
belonging to Atreus and his children, where their treasures were
kept. There is the tomb of Atreus, and of those whom Aigisthos
slew at the banquet, on their return from Ilion with Agamemnon....
There is also the tomb of Agamemnon, and that of Eurymedon the
charioteer, and the joint tomb of Teledamos and Pelops, the twin
children of Kassandra, whom Aigisthos slew with their parents while
still mere babes.... Klytemnestra and Aigisthos were buried a little
way outside the walls, for they were not thought worthy to be within,
where Agamemnon lay and those who fell with him.'
Persuaded in his own mind of the truth of this statement, Schliemann,
while clearing the Lion Gate, and investigating the already rifted
tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus, caused a great pit, 113 feet
square, to be dug within the walls at a distance of about 40 feet
from the Lion Gate. With the most extraordinary good fortune he
had hit 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 first idea was that he had discovered the
Agora of Mycenæ, the 'well-polished circle of stones' on which
the elders of the city sat for councilor judgment, as Hephæstos
depicted them on the shield of Achilles; but even this discovery
did not satisfy him; he was resolved to go down to virgin soil
or rock, and his perseverance was rewarded.
First there came into view a circular altar, and several steles
of soft stone with rude carvings in relief, which seemed to point
to interments beneath, and a system of offerings to, or on behalf
of, the dead. Three feet below the altar, and 23 feet below the
surface level, there came to light the top of the first of a group
of five 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 the graves were filled with earth and pebbles.
Mingled with the débris brought down by the collapse of the roofs
lay human bodies, one in the smallest grave, five in the largest,
and three in each of the others; and along with them had been buried
one of the most remarkable hoards of treasure that ever greeted
the eye of a discoverer.
[Illustration VI: THE CUP-BEARER, KNOSSOS (_p_. 67)
From 'The Palace of Minos,' by Arthur J. Evans, in _The Monthly
Review_]
Gold was there in profusion, beaten into masks for the faces of the
dead (perhaps to protect them from the evil eye), into head-bands,
breast-pieces, plaques of all shapes and sizes, and wrought into
bracelets, rings, pins, baldrics, and dagger and sword hilts. Along
with the gold was store of wrought ivory, amber, silver, bronze,
and alabaster. One 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 attacking an ox, three fine intaglios,
two pairs of gold scales, fifty-one embossed ornaments, and more
than seven hundred ornaments for sewing on garments! A few scattered
objects and a sixth grave were found later, the latter, however,
not by Dr. Schliemann. The mere money-value of the finds amounted
to something like four thousand pounds sterling!
Money-value, however, was nothing in Schliemann's eyes compared
with the thought that he had discovered the actual graves which
Pausanias saw, and in which Agamemnon and his companions were buried
after their tragic end at the hands of Aigisthos and Klytemnestra.
To his eager enthusiasm many of the circumstances of the discovery
seemed to lend probability to such a supposition. The disorder in
which the bodies were found, one with its head crushed down upon
the bosom, the half-shut eye of one of the mute company, and other
indications, seemed to point to such haste in the interment as might
have been expected in the case of a King and his companions who had
met with so tragic a fate. Accordingly, the discoverer announced
in his famous telegram to the King of the Hellenes, and 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 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.
[Illustration VII: THE LONG GALLERY, KNOSSOS (_p_. 68)]
Following up his excavations at Mycenæ, Schliemann, in 1880-81,
excavated at Orchomenos in Botia 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 to the wide diffusion
of Mycenæan culture.
Roughly, the result came to this: 'that before the epoch at which
we are used to place the beginnings of Greek civilization--that is,
the opening centuries of the last millennial period B.C.--we must
allow for an immensely long record of human artistic productivity,
going back into the Neolithic Age, 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 existed human society in the Hellenic area, organized and
productive, to a period so remote that its origins were more distant
from the age of Pericles than that age is from our own. We have
probably to deal with a total period of civilization in the Ægean
not much shorter than in the Nile Valley.[*]
[Footnote *: Hogarth, 'Authority and Archæology,' p. 230.]
The estimate in Hogarth's last sentence, which was published in
1899, before Evans's great discoveries in Crete, was one that must
have seemed extravagant to those who, while familiar with the great
antiquity of Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, 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 civilization of Greece meets the two great ancient
civilizations of Babylon and Egypt on substantially equal terms.
In antiquity it appears to be practically contemporary with them;
in artistic merit it need not shrink from comparison with either
of them.
In the earlier stages of the discussion which followed on the
discoveries, it was assumed, perhaps somewhat hastily, that such
a culture could not have been indigenous, resemblances to Egyptian
and Mesopotamian work were pointed out, and it was suggested that
the impulse and the skill which gave rise to the art of Mycenæ were
not native but borrowed, the Phnicians being generally held to
be the medium through which the influence of the East had filtered
into the Ægean area. As time has gone on, however, the Phnicians
have gradually come to bulk less and less in the view of students
of the Ægean problem. It is no longer held that they contributed
anything original to the development of Mycenæan 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 Phnician 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 Ægean gave quite as much as it borrowed, and that its
artists were sufficiently great to have originated their own culture.
Mycenæan, and still more the great Minoan art of which Mycenæan has
proved to be only a decadent phase, needed no Oriental crutches.
With regard to Egypt, the obligations of the two cultures were
certainly mutual; each influenced the other; it was not a case of
master and scholar, but of two contemporary civilizations, each
fully inspired with a native spirit, each ready to use whatever
seemed good to it in the work of the other, but both perfectly
original in their genius.
The question which was of such supreme interest to Schliemann still
survives, however, though in a wider and more important form than
that in which he conceived of it. It is no longer a question of
whether the graves which he found were actually those of Agamemnon
and his fellow-victims in the dark tragedy of Mycenæ, but of whether
the people and the civilization whose remains have been brought
to light are, or are not, the people and the civilization from
which the Homeric bards drew the whole setting of their poems.
Were the Mycenæans the Greeks of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and
was it their culture that is depicted for us in these great poems?
The arguments in favour of such a supposition are of considerable
strength. For one thing, we have the remarkable coincidence between
the geography of the poems and the localities over which the Mycenæan
culture is seen to have extended. The towns and lands which occupy
the foremost place in the Homeric story are also those in which the
most convincing evidences of Mycenæan culture have been discovered.
Foremost, of course, we have Mycenæ itself. To Homer, 'golden,'
'broad-wayed' Mycenæ is the seat of the great leader of all the
Achæans, the King of men, Agamemnon; it is also the chief seat of
the culture which goes by its name. Orchomenos, Pylos, Lacedæmon,
Attica, all prominent in the poems, are also well-known seats of
Mycenæan 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 supreme centre of that still greater and richer
civilization of which the Mycenæan is a later and comparatively
degenerate form. There is no need to enter into further detail; but
broadly it is the fact that the distribution of Mycenæan remains
practically follows, at least to a great extent, the geography of
the poems. The world with which the Homeric bards were familiar was,
in the main, the world in which the civilization of the Mycenæans
prevailed.
The Homeric house also finds a striking parallel in the details
of the Mycenæan palaces whose remains have been preserved. Leaving
aside all disputed points, the broad fact remains that 'all the
structural features described, the courtyard, with its altar to
Zeus and trench for sacrifices; the 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 Mycenæ, and
in Crete.' In Crete, along with the resemblances above referred
to, are found important differences, such as the position of the
hearth, and the details of the lighting. These, which are probably
due to differences of climate, do not, however, invalidate the
fact of the general correspondence.
In details, we have the frieze of _kuanos_ of the Palace of Alcinous,
paralleled by the fragments discovered, as already mentioned, at
Tiryns, and by similar friezes at Knossos, while the bronze walls
of the same palace have been, if not paralleled, at all events
illustrated, by the bronze decorations of the vaults of the great
bee-hive tombs at Mycenæ and Orchomenos. The parallel is, perhaps,
even closer when we come to the details of metal-working, which
are described for us in Homer, and of which illustrations have
been found in such profusion among the Mycenæan 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 table, but Nestor the
Old raised it easily.' The Mycenæan finds have yielded examples of
metal-working which seem to come as near to the Homeric pictures as
it is possible for material things to come to verbal descriptions.
One of the golden cups from the Fourth Grave at Mycenæ might almost
have been a copy on a small scale of Nestor's cup, save that it
had only two handles instead of four. On the handles, as in the
Homeric picture, doves are feeding, and like Nestor's, the Mycenæan
cup is riveted with gold.
Or, take again such examples of another form of art-work in metal
as are given by the scenes of the lion hunt and the hunting-cats
on the dagger-blades found in Graves IV. and V. at Mycenæ. In the
first of these scenes we have a representation of five men attacking
three lions. The foremost man has been thrown down by the assault
of the first lion, and is entangled in his great shield. His four
companions are coming to his help, one armed with a bow, the others
carrying spears and huge shields, two of them of the typical Mycenæan
figure-eight shape. Only the first lion awaits their onset, the
other two are in full flight. The whole work is characterized by
extraordinary vivacity; but it 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. 'The cats,
the plants, and the bodies of the ducks are inlaid with gold, the
wings of the ducks and the river are silver, and the fish are given
in some dark substance. On the neck of one of the ducks is a red
drop of blood, probably given by alloyed gold.' Here we have the
very type of art in which the decorations of the shield of Achilles
were carried out. 'Also he set therein a vineyard teeming plenteously
with clusters, wrought fair in gold; black were the grapes, but
the vines hung throughout on silver poles. And around it he ran
a ditch of _kuanos_, and round that a fence of tin.... Also he
wrought therein a herd of kine with upright horns, and the kine
were fashioned of gold and tin.'
Such are some of the points which countenance the idea that in
the Mycenæan people we have the originals of the people of the
Homeric poems. On the other hand there are difficulties, by no
means inconsiderable, in the way of such a belief. Of these the
chief is the question of the method in which the bodies of the dead
are disposed of. The men of the Homeric poems burned their dead;
the men of the Mycenæan civilization buried theirs. Undoubtedly this
is a serious difficulty in the way 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 things used
by the body during life, by the action of fire. On the other hand,
those who buried their dead believed that the spirit of the dead
man dwelt in some fashion in the tomb, or at least hovered around
the body, waiting, perhaps, for a reincarnation, and capable of
using the weapons, the utensils, and the foods of its former life.
Therefore the body was carefully interred, sometimes even embalmed,
and its weapons and foods, or at all events simulacra of these,
were laid beside it.
The distinction between the two lines of thought is clear and strong;
but it does not necessarily presuppose an absolute distinction of
race. It is not improbable that towards the end of the Mycenæan
period, to which in any case the connection with the Homeric poems
would belong, cremation was beginning to supersede the older practice
of interment. In late Mycenæan 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 within a
comparatively short period. It has even been suggested that no
interval of time of any great extent is needed, as the practice
of cremation may quickly develop among any race, being prompted
by the comfortable idea that when the flesh is disposed of, the
possibly inconvenient, possibly even vampire, ghost of a disagreeable
ancestor goes along with it.
Another difficulty arises from the fact that the Homeric poems
certainly contemplate a much wider use of iron than can be found
among the remains of the Mycenæan people. But the weight of this
objection may easily be exaggerated. Certainly the equipment
contemplated for the Homeric heroes is in most cases of bronze,
though the well-known line from the Odyssey, 'iron does of itself
attract a man,' bears witness to a time when iron had become the
almost universal fighting metal. But even in some of the Mycenæan
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, but had not altogether
superseded, the older metal, should, while clinging in general
to the old poetic word used by their predecessors, occasionally
introduce the name of the metal which was becoming prevalent in their
day. From this point of view the difficulty seems to disappear. The
Homeric age proper is one of bronze-using people; but, in the later
stages of the development of the poems, iron makes its appearance,
just as it had been gradually doing in the generally bronze-using
Mycenæan civilization.
The same remark applies to the differences of equipment between
the warriors of the Mycenæan and those of the Homeric period. The
Mycenæans used the great hide-shield, either oblong or 8-shaped,
covering its bearer from head to foot, with a leather cap for the
head, and no defensive armour of metal. In the Iliad, on the other
hand, what is obviously contemplated in general is a metal helmet,
a metal cuirass, and a comparatively small round shield. But, again,
in later Mycenæan 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 Mycenæan shield 'like a tower.' Periphetes of Mycenæ is slain
by Hector owing to his having tripped over the lower edge of his
great shield, and his slayer himself bears a shield of no small
proportions. 'So saying, Hector of the glancing helm departed,
and the black hide beat on either side against his ankles and his
neck, even the rim that ran uttermost about his bossed shield.' So
that the poems represent a gradual development in the use of armour
which may not unfairly be compared with the similar development
traceable in the Mycenæan remains.
On the whole, then, our conclusion is something like this: The
civilization which Schliemann discovered is not precisely that
of the Homeric poems, for the bloom of it belongs to a period
considerably anterior to the period of Achæan supremacy in Greece,
and was the work of a race differing from that of the chiefs who
fought at Troy; but, broadly speaking, what Homer describes is the
same civilization in its latest stage, when the men of Mycenæan
or Minoan stock who created it had passed under the dominion of the
invading Achæan overlords. The Achæan invasion was not, like that
which succeeded it, subversive of the great culture that belonged to
the conquered Mycenæan 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 Mycenæan culture, still existing, though under Achæan
supremacy, which is depicted in the Homeric poems. 'Take away from
the picture,' says Father Browne, 'all the features which have
been borrowed from the Dorian invasion, give the post-Dorian poets
the credit of the references to iron and other post-Dorian things,
and nothing remains to disprove the view of those who hold that
Schliemann found--not, indeed, the tomb of Agamemnon--but the tomb
of that Homeric life which Agamemnon represents to us. In the Mycenæan
remains we have uncovered before our eyes the material form of that
impulse of which we had already met the spiritual in the Homeric
page.'[*]
[Footnote *: H. Browne, 'Homeric Study,' pp. 313, 314.]