Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/350

Mycen/e. 325 within the stone circle is largely composed. Nor is it difificult to grasp how these slid down and got mixed up with the rubbish piled in the grave at the time of the interment, when we remember the mode of closing it. Schliemann, as we know, recoiled from the notion that the tombs could contain more corpses than are mentioned by Pausanias ; accordingly he was led to conclude that each grave had been blocked up after interment, with earth cast indifferently on the burning embers, of the pyre, the bodies richly apparelled, and the sumptuous furniture ; whilst certain traces of rehandling in one of the tombs ^ were proofs that the dead had been disturbed and partly plundered. But is it conceivable that the corpses would have been decked out in magnificent robes, studded with gold and silver, crowned with diadems of exquisite workmanship, surrounded with multitudinous vases of gold and terra-cotta, to be placed on the bare ground and savagely crushed under earth and stones heaped around and over them ? What one might have expected to find here are chambers analogous to the **mastabas" of Lower Egypt, or the Theban **syringas"; that is to say, vaults where friendly hands had reverently surrounded the dead with the luxury which had been his on earth, in order that he might continue to lead, in the boundless and mysterious life beyond the grave, the existence to which he had been accustomed in this. Schliemann failed to grasp the real character of these inter- ments ; but Dr. Dcirpfeld's technical knowledge and more critical insight enabled him to shed a new light on this point. At the time of the Mycenian excavations (1876), he was detained at Olympia; but he collaborated with Schliemann in exploring Tiryns (188 5- 1886), and finding himself in the neighbourhood of Mycenae, he went over the ruins for the purpose of studying the questions which the discoveries of his employer had left open. He made special inquiries of workmen and visitors who had been present at the opening of the graves, and the data which he thus gathered supplied him with the means of reaching conclusions of his own.^ Schliemann mentions schistose slabs, which he thought had formed the lining of the small walls, made of rubble and clay, fifty or sixty centimetres deep, and slightly 1 Schliemann. i '^ ScHUCHARDT, SchUcmaHfCs Ausgrabungen,