Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/373

346 Primitive Greece : Mycenian Art. these chambers, four in one and two in another. They were small and insignificant, and only contained children's bones and valueless objects, bronze pins and terra-cotta vases. Upright slabs, and others horizontally placed to form the lid. went to the making of these graves. This was the first time that inhumations were found within the house. That they are contemporaneous with the buildings on the floor of which they were uncovered, is proved from the accumulations, cir, two metres deep, that covered them, interspersed with broken pottery exactly similar to the oldest specimens which have come from the shaft-graves. The houses in question, though of mean appearance as compared with those whose walls and floors were painted, have yielded two small treasures, consisting of implements and bronze weapons. They lay still undisturbed in their hiding-places, cavities that had been made in the wall, so as to secure them against pilfer- ing hands. A bronze statuette, one of the rarest of all art products in that distant period, was found here. Judging from the general character of these several finds, notably certain fibulae, M. Tsoundas is inclined to place these objects, which he thinks home-made, and the houses in which they were discovered, towards the end of the Mycenian period. Our task, whether at Troy or Tiryns, terminated with the description of the castle and the defensive works. As to the populations which doubtless inhabited the lower city, the traces they have left behind them are so evanescent, that their existence was inferred rather than established. Here the case is entirely different. Apart from the Mycenian acropolis, we find a second walled city, some of whose monuments are among the most stately which the civilization we are considering has produced. Its area, however, was soon found too narrow to accommodate the increasing population which flocked here to place themselves under the protecting shadow of the stout fortress. This is proved by the sustaining walls, covered with the ruins of the houses they once supported, and which extend on the slopes of the heights overhanging Mycenae. In this open quarter of the town, besides the Perseia, the only other springs which could supply water to the Mycenians were the Epano and Katopigadi sources, as they are now called. Here too, apparently, have been discovered the foundations of a temple and the domed-buildings which Pausanias calls Treasuries, but in which we recognize