The Sea-Kings of Crete. James Baikie
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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.
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