Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/486

Building Materials. 459 mountain range which fences in the Argolic plain at every point of the compass. At the present day we should have to go to Arcadia to find vertical and cross beams of the dimensions that must have been used in the great halls of Tiryns and Mycenae ; but in that distant past the Argolic heights had doubt- less not yet been deprived of their forests by man's stupidity and the gnawing tooth of animals. The Hellenes of the classic age, and above all Plato, already deplore the alarming progress of this denudation ; the latter, in a curious passage of Critias, declares that Attica is not so well furnished as it was in former times, when their ancestors had found it clothed with many plants and trees.^ Walls composed of rubble, unbaked brick, and wood could not be easily worked up to an even surface or made weather- proof : a casing of some sort became absolutely necessary. Now quicklime furnishes the best of linings, and chalk can be obtained from all the calcareous conglomerates and cretaceous deposits which constitute the mountain system of Argolis, by subjecting the stone to the action of fire. This they had learnt to do at an early date throughout the region which we have traversed. The prehistoric buildings of Thera, like those of the burnt city of Troy, are overlaid with a coat of clay ; ^ but the walls, the flights of steps, and floors of the principal rooms of the palace, whether at Tiryns or Mycenae, are all cemented, sometimes several layers deep. Lime, then, was a regular article of fabrication, and one is not a little surprised to find that masons who made so liberal a use of it should have been so slow in discovering that, if mixed with sand, it would make the best mortar in the world. The only bonding material is mud, pure and simple, or mixed with a little hay and chopped straw, to infuse into it a little more consistency and cohesion. The primitive builder, unlike his modern confrere, was timid in handling metal, and made a sparing use of it in his buildings, where it never appears as supports or frame-work : he set it apart to line, complete, and set off" his shapes. His choice was not the result of inexperience, since we find him, at Tiryns, Mycenae, and Orchomenos, not only in full possession of the resources which his successor will marshal out in the ^ Plato. - FouQUE, Santorin et ses eruptions ; Schliemann, Ilios.