58 HISTORY OF GREECE, ROME, AND ASIA 



most of it in this country, and as a stranger, you have at least one 

 measure of his talent which you will easily appreciate. He had the 

 singularity to devote half of that fortune to exploring the Homeric 

 sites, and thus proving the historic value of the Iliad and Odyssey. 

 And he went to work with the spade, at first ignorantly, for he dug 

 holes, which is the most destructive form of inquiry known, instead 

 of taking off layers or strata of earth, as he learned to do in his later 

 years. He found less than he expected or believed, so far as he hoped 

 to find and thought he had found the actual tombs of Agamemnon 

 and Clytemnestra, or any direct evidence of the Homeric story. But 

 when Homer speaks of the fortified Tiryns, the much golden Mykense, 

 the sacred Ilion, Schliernann found far more than he had ever divined; 

 for he disclosed to the astonished Hellenists of his day a whole rich 

 primitive civilization, which subsequent exploration found to be not 

 peculiar to Argolis, but spread over most of Greece, being carried by 

 trade oversea across the ^Egean,and recurring even in distant Egypt. 

 This Mykensean civilization, as we now call it, is known by its 

 handicrafts and arts, above all by its pottery, its gold and silver orna- 

 ments, its beehive tombs, its elaborate palaces. And so wide were its 

 ranges in transmarine commerce, that we have found not only 

 Egyptian scarabs, but ostrich eggs from inner Africa, and Baltic 

 amber among its treasures. Three questions were immediately raised 

 concerning this large discovery: first, how old was it? secondly, was 

 it identical with Homer's civilization, or not? And if not, was it 

 indeed Greek? Its great age was settled not merely by the archaic 

 character of its art, and its very small use of iron, but still more 

 clearly by the occurrence of early Egyptian articles, dating from about 

 1400-1200 B. c., and showing that intercourse of Egypt with Greece 

 was far older than the Homeric age. There was also this negative 

 evidence, which I alone had pressed on Schliemann before he com- 

 menced his work. I inferred from the total ignoring of Mykenae by 

 yEschylus, whose tragedies ought to have been enacted there, that 

 in his day the practical knowledge of the city was gone, and that it 

 had already then been long destroyed. I forewarned him that he 

 would find there no Greek coins or inscriptions. He found no writing 

 of any sort whatever. But as we now know that in the old Cretan 

 remains the inscriptions were on clay tablets, which are easily de- 

 stroyed by exposure to rain, I think it possible that he may have 

 overlooked some such documents. 1 



As regards the correspondence of the remains with Homeric 

 pictures, the contrasts seem to me rather greater than the likenesses. 

 The armor was undoubtedly the model of the Homeric weapons; the 

 tombs have some Greek features; but on the whole, the question 

 whether the epoch was one of purely primitive culture, or of some- 

 1 That is Mr. Arthur Evans's opinion also. 



