ARCHEOLOGY. 



sculpture belonging to the best period of Greek 

 art. 



The excavations of the American school at 

 Argos have laid bare a large marble building 

 which is believed to lie the gymnasium, and a 

 number of tombs of the Mycena-an age. 



Tin- British school at Athens began, in 1893- 

 '1)4. excavations on the site of Alia-, in Phocis 

 a place famous for its oracle, and which was 

 mentioned also by Sophocles, Herodotus, and 

 Pausanias as having a fortress and a temple of 

 Apollo. A few weeks of excavation failed to 

 reveal much of great interest, and the place 

 appeared to have been sacked. An encouraging 

 report was made to the school on the prospects 

 of archaeological discovery at, Alexandria, but 

 adequate funds for carrying on the work were 

 wanting. There is,' however, an active archae- 

 ological society in that city, which has done a 

 considerable amount of work with very limited 

 funds. 



In the excavation of Delphi by the French 

 school and M. Homolle, sufficient data have 

 been obtained for the determination of the main 

 features of the topography of the town and its 

 sanctuaries. One of the most important recov- 

 eries is that of the treasury of the Athenians, a 

 building corresponding to the series of treas- 

 uries identified at Olyrnpia, in which each of the 

 more prominent cities set up offerings, carved 

 inscriptions, and made deposits of value for 

 maintaining the dignity of the city and the 

 safety of its property. In restoring this build- 

 ing, the numerous 'inscriptions on the inner 

 walls have helped, in the fitting together of the 

 texts, to put the stones back in their exact 

 places. According to Pausanias, the building 

 was erected in commemoration of the battle of 

 Marathon, but the finding of an inscription of 

 such antiquity is not anticipated. One of the 

 texts recovered from Delphi is a hymn or 

 hymns inscribed on the inner wall of the treas- 

 ure house, with the music noted over the text. 

 The texts and music have been discussed and 

 commented upon by M. Henri Weil and M. 

 Theodor Reinach. The scale corresponds with 

 that of (' Minor in its melodic form, with some 

 accidentals introduced in one passage. The 

 pitch has not been fully determined. Its range 

 appears, according to the present accepted de- 

 terminations, too high for any chest voice, but 

 it is believed by M. Reinach that the ancient 

 practical pitch was one third lower than that 

 which has been assigned to this scale by later 

 theorists. The time is given by the metre, 

 which is pa-onie, a long syllable and three short 

 ones, variously placed, or two long and a short 

 I ict ween them in every case f in the bar a 

 measure strange to us and very difficult to ob- 



serve. We fall naturally into f. There is no 

 harmony; and although there is rhythm, and a 

 recurrence of phrases to mark the close of a 

 period, melody in the modern sense has not been 

 found. 



In the course of the excavations at Corinth 

 the actual level of the ground has been found to 

 be so much higher than in ancient times that a 

 good number of buildings have been preserved, 

 with unusual height oi' walling. Thus a house 

 of good Hellenic period was found, with the 

 pavement and stylobate of the atrium entire, and 

 covered by a Byzantine building which has pre- 

 served many architectural fragments belonging 

 to the former. 



The identification as the city of the Iliad with 

 the city excavated as that by Dr. Schliemann on 

 the now almost universally accepted site of an- 

 cient Troy has never been wholly satisfactory, 

 on account of the small compass of that city 

 and the rudeness of its work and its potteries, as 

 compared with those of the fortresses of the con- 

 temporary Mycenae and Tiryns, which Homer 

 described as not superior to that of Ilion. It 

 will be recollected that Dr. Schliemann found 

 the remains of six successive cities on this site. 

 Renewing the explorations there, Dr. Dorpfeld 

 has found outside of this city surrounding it, 

 and on a higher and therefore more modern level 

 the fortifications of a town more exactly cor- 

 responding in these respects with the ruins of 

 the two ancient Grecian capitals. He concludes 

 that Dr. Schliemann's Troy is a far older founda- 

 tion than this, which more closely corresponds 

 to the idea of the Homeric Troy. 



A study has been made by Arthur J. Evans of 

 certain stones he found in Greece, three- and 

 four-sided, perforated along the axes, and en- 

 graved with a series of symbols appearing to be 

 a hieroglyphic distinct from the Egyptian and 

 probably belonging to an independent system, 

 of which a Cretan origin was traced. The in- 

 vestigation was continued on Cretan soil, where 

 more than 80 different symbols were collected. 

 The evidence supplied by these and other Cretan 

 finds is interpreted by the author as showing 

 " that long before the time when the Phoenician 

 alphabet was first introduced into Greece, the 

 ^Egean islanders, like their Asiatic neighbors, 

 had developed an independent system of writing. 

 Of this writing there are two phases : one picto- 

 graphic, and much resembling the Hittite ; the 

 other linear, and distinctly alphabetic in char- 

 acter. This latter system was certainly a sylla- 

 bary, in part at least identical with that of Cy- 

 prus perhaps, indeed, its direct progenitor. 

 There are indications that both these systems 

 extended to the Peloponnesus, though Crete 

 seems to have been their chief center ; and there 





Fio. 3. GREEK INSCRIPTION AT ABU SIMBEL, ABOUT 600 B. c. 



