Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/272

Troy. 249 These skeletons may be those of the owners of the houses in which they were discovered, who perished; whilst fighting for their homes on the day when the town was taken and destroyed ; or of soldiers who fell in their armour during the last assault.' The excavations have also yielded a few vases of much smaller dimensions, which contained human ashes, teeth, small bone?, and in one of them an almost perfect cranium (Fig. 66),^ The pottery wherein these remains were discovered is of a rude description, and seems to have been made in this district from the remotest age down to the full growth of Hellenic civilization. There is much to be said in favour of the conjecture which has been put forward with regard to these urns, to the effect that they largely belong to the period which followed the destruction of the second city ; and that they continued to be put there until the Macedonian epoch. If two were found almost on the rock, in the soil of the > Ilios; ProtokolL " The account which ajjpears in the //ios about these urns would be misleading enough, had not Schliemann taken care to inform us that in those early days his imi)errect technical knowledge led him to call " funerary " {as(kefiurn) all urns which in shape were more or less akin to examples so used by most nations of antiquity. The number of vases, he declares, which contained human ashes is exceedingly small. In one was discovered an embryo. ^ ScHUCHARDT, ScMUmanft's Ausgrabungett.