PREHISTORIC MAN, ETC. 355 



ance, at Novilara ; and at Hallstadt ; and here again, both in 

 tradition and among the finds, there is evidence that the 

 metal became established first as an ornamental rarity, and 

 only subsequently as a substitute for bronze. 



42. But though in its principal centres Mykensean 

 civilisation has all the appearance of having been suddenly 

 and violently extinguished, this must not be taken to be 

 universally the case. In Argolis (at Tiryns, and the Heraion), 

 in Attica, and in Melos, for example, there is every reason to 

 believe that the Mykenaean civilisation survives, though in 

 very degenerate phases, into the period when Iron and the 

 characteristic art of the early Iron Age are already well 

 established ; and at Nauplia and the Attic Salamis, and 

 still more in Crete, in Karia, and in Cyprus, the stages may 

 be clearly traced by which, so far as in it lay, the Iron Age 

 took up its inheritance from the Age of Bronze. The 

 nature and the result of this transference are easily sum- 

 marised. 



43. It has been already indicated, firstly, that through- 

 out the Eastern Mediterranean, in fact throughout the whole 

 range of the Mediterranean Early Bronze Culture, the 

 indigenous system of decoration is instinctively rectilinear 

 and geometrical ; secondly, that in the Cycladic area and 

 in the Middle Bronze Age a quite irreconcilable and purely 

 naturalistic and quite heterogeneous impulse appears ; and 

 thirdly, that the fully formed Mykenaean style, when it 

 appears, is, in spite of its far superior technical skill and 

 elegance, already beginning to stagnate in many depart- 

 ments ; the gem-engraving and modelling developing last, 

 and retaining their vigour and elasticity latest ; whereas 

 the ceramic decoration, which appears in its noblest 

 form at Thera and at Kamarais, is the first to exhibit the 

 conventional and mechanical repetition of a shrinking 

 assortment of motives. We may now add, fourthly, 

 that this failure of originality permitted of a recrudescence 

 of the rectilinear instinct which, though overwhelmed for 

 the time by the naturalistic and curvilinear principles, had 

 co-existed with them throughout ; and that both floral and 

 spiral motives, once allowed to repeat themselves without 



