Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/139

ii8 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. effort, preceded that wherein the task of the artisan is simplified and singularly abridged by the malleability of the metal, and its readiness to take any shape under the hammer which beats it out, or in the mould where it marries every salience and hollow. To admit that Greece alone of all countries had no stone age, we must suppose a people, already in possession of all the ap- pliances of a superior culture, having landed on her as yet deserted shores and occupied the empty country. This hypothesis however is not only improbable in itself, but is belied by the Greeks themselves and the notion they entertained of their humble beginnings, as well as . by the recent discoveries made at Hissarlik and Tiryns, where remains of the oldest settlements, in which all the handicrafts were still in their infancy, have been exhumed. The Ston^ Age in Greece, When we attempt to draw up the balance-sheet of the Grecian stone age, we are not beset by an embarrassing mass of materials, such as are beheld in other lands, Mexico and Scandinavia for example. The paucity of objects of this nature stands out all the more clearly that until the other day we knew not where to look for them. We cannot demand of them megalithic monuments, menhirs, cromlechs, and dolmens, for the simple reason that none are found in Greece or on the coasts of Asia Minor.^ The pile-villages that were said to exist in Thessaly on the lake Bibeis, and in Macedonia on the lake Prasias, have turned out to be quite modern, having no connection whatever with the ancient palafit constructions mentioned by Herodotus. In them moreover no objects mounting back to antiquity have been discovered.^ There is apparently as little ^ The so-called dolmen which Dumont claims to have seen at Amorgos has never been found by subsequent travellers, despite diligent search for it. ^ The talk respecting the discovery of the palafits in question, signed as it were by Herodotus, rested on Deville's testimony ; but his Memoir, owing to his untimely death, was never published, and is only known by Egger's summary in Rapport sur les travaux des numbres de PJtcole fran^aise dAthknes^ 1863. Sir John Lubbock, however, affirms that the said dwellings are quite recent (Man before History)^ and analogous to the huts which Dumont noticed on the banks of Lake Bibeis.