Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/158

Method followed in the Study of this Civilization. 137 with a general family air. These tribes were separated by moun- tains or the sea from one another, and did not own allegiance to a supreme head ; each obeyed its own chief and lived its individual and independent life. The designation applied by contemporary archaeology to this civilization has found general acceptance. The state which had Mycenae for its capital appears to have been the most influential among those that constituted themselves on continental Greece, during the four or five centuries that went on before the Dorian invasion. This view of the case is strengthened by the Epos, for it places Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, at the head of the princes arrayed against Troy. Study of the ground has confirmed literary evidence. The ruins of the circuit- wall and the Mycenian buildings are the most imposing of all those that apparently go back to what is sometimes called the heroic age ; and on no ancient site have excavations yielded so much wealth, or conveyed the notion of so fine a development of art and industr)^ Among the discoveries which for the last thirty years have disclosed to us a Greece totally forgotten and older than Homeric Greece, none have created so deep an impression as those made on the Mycenian acropolis. These, far better than aught else, have furnished us with the means of defining this civilization, and at once singling it out from the civilizations* whether of Egypt, Asia, or classic Greece, of which latter it forms as it were the preface. Although it knew of the elder cultures, it was not directly derived from either of them. Finally, there is another reason which of itself would have dissuaded us from setting aside the consecrated appellation, in that we should have been sorely puzzled to propose a new or better one. That which heads this chapter has at least the advantage of being at once understood wherever Hellenic studies are cultivated. With due reserve, then, we shall retain it, happy if in the end we succeed in determining with more precision than was formerly possible, the principal characteristics of what we will continue to call *' Mycenian civilization." Although we are still perplexed by many obscurities, many unsolved problems, discoveries dating but from yesterday have shed somewhat of light on this mysterious culture, on its beginnings and affinities, as well as the relations it entertained with the stranger, and the secret ties which connected it with a later evolution of the Hellenic mind, and its supreme unfolding.