SC I E N C E -Supplement. 



FRIDAY, JANUARY 8. 1886. 



THE PALACE OF THE KINGS OF TIRYNS. 



" The untiring enthusiasm and liberality of one 

 man have earned the gratitude of all civilized races, 

 so long as the human past shall have any interest 

 for mankind." These were the words with which 

 one of the most accomplished of English scholars 

 welcomed the appearance of Dr. Schliemanns 

 narrative of his explorations at ancient Mykenae. 

 And now we have to thank him for another 

 volume, 1 equalling in interest the four he has 

 already given to the world of letters, and even 

 surpassing them in the beauty of its mechanical 

 execution. Moreover, we tliink he has displayed 

 sound judgment in allowing his learned collabora- 

 tors to contribute the major part of the text of 

 tlie present volume, for it is by his energy and 

 success as an explorer that he will be always 

 remembered. He is neither a learned scholar nor 

 a trained archeologist : and, where he has relied 

 solely upon his own resources in setting forth the 

 results of his researches, he has frequently drawn 

 conclusions which have met with but little favor at 

 the hands of scholars. From similar failings the 

 present work is by no means exempt : but such 

 blemishes, like patches on the cheek of beauty, 

 only heighten the intrinsic merits of this most 

 important contribution to our knowledge of the 

 ancient world ; not to our knowledge of what is 

 commonly understood by the phrase ' prehistoric 

 times,' — for we think it a misnomer to call 

 what he has brought to light 1 the prehistoric 

 palace of the kings of Tiryns,' who, as he thinks, 

 nourished some fourteen hundred years B.C., — 

 but to our accurate comprehension of the heroic 

 age of Greece, those early times about which, 

 hitherto, the Homeric poems have been our only 

 source of information. We may well be grateful 

 to him for the light which has thus been shed 

 upon many an obscure passage or questionable 

 statement in those earliest records of the western 

 world. But in regard to what is known in arche- 

 ology as the ' prehistoric period,' by which is to 

 be understood a certain stage in the development 

 of civilization, Dr. Schliemann seems to entertain 

 very misty notions. He speaks of finding in the 



1 Tiryas: the prehistoric palace of the kings of Tiryns. 

 The results of the latest excavations. By Dr. Henry Schlie- 

 mann. With preface by Prof. F. Adler, and contributions 

 by Dr. William Dorpfeld. New York, Scribner, 1885. 4°. 



ruins of the palace arrow-heads of obsidian 

 " rudely made : in fact, as rudely as the arrow- 

 heads of silex found in the cave-dwellings of the 

 age of the mammoth and the reindeer in the 

 Dordogne, in France, and to be seen in numbers 

 in the prehistoric museum at St.-Germain-en- 

 Laye " (p. 78). But no such things exist as rude 

 arrow-heads found in the caves of the Dordogne : 

 and it is one of the commonplaces of prehistoric 

 archeology that in the paleolithic period, to which 

 these caves must be referred, bows and arrows 

 had not yet been invented. He gives four draw- 

 ings of these remarkable ' arrow-heads,' which 

 precisely resemble four similar objects that the 

 writer picked up upon the slopes of the Acrop- 

 olis at Athens. But they are only fragments 

 of obsidian flakes, which are abundant upon pre- 

 historic sites in Greece ; and they merely prove 

 that a particular spot was occupied by man in the 

 stone age. Yet the finding of these bits of stone, 

 accompanied by fragments of rude, hand-made 

 pottery, in the debris of the palace, furnishes our 

 author his main argument to prove that it was de- 

 stroyed in prehistoric times. But it is a common 

 thing to find such fragments as these disseminated 

 throughout the soil in the places where they occur : 

 and, although Dr. Schliemann may have come upon 

 them in the earth that has accumulated above the 

 ruins of the palace, then presence proves nothing 

 more than the antiquity of the site, whether it be 

 at Tiryns or at Athens. But Dr. Schliemann can 

 actually believe that such rude arrow-heads as 

 these were still in use contemporaneously with the 

 occupation of the remarkable edifice he has dis- 

 interred and described. His own excavations, 

 however, at Mykenae had already disclosed the 

 kind of stone arrow-heads employed at the close 

 of the high civilization of the bronze age. — ex- 

 quisitely fashioned out of obsidian, of the Solutre 

 type, thin, delicate, and provided with barbs. 



So, again, he argues for a very high antiquity 

 for the earliest remains he has discovered, because 

 he finds among them a kind of rude, hand-made 

 pottery, consisting of vessels, or portions of them, 

 provided with handles pierced with two perpen- 

 dicular holes for suspension ; while, of those hav- 

 ing similar horizontal perforations, two examples 

 only were met with. The former kind is not un- 

 common in the Swiss lake-dwellings, and in some 

 other localities belonging to the Neolithic period : 

 and he quotes Professor Virchow as authority for 

 inferring from such similarity ' a direct connec- 



