Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/117

88 Primitive Greece : Mycenian Art. similar graves has lately been uncovered on the Athenian Acropolis. Tombs become more simple and rude in construction in ratio to their distance from Argolis. Those met with in the Cyclades are no more than holes dug in the ground ; but wherever the sepultures have had greater care bestowed on them, the sides are lined with slabs set up edgewise ; and a covering slab is horizontally placed over a cavity in which the body can only have reposed in a squatting posture. Sometimes, as at Melos- Philacopi, the chambers, being rock-hewn, are unprovided with a dromos ; they then open directly on the outside,^ and are therefore less well hidden than in Argolis. The excavations which have been systematically and carefully carried on in Cyprus during the last few years, have enabled MM. Ohnefalsch Richter and Dummler to classify the necropoles into distinct periods, answering to different phases in the existence of the inhabitants."' The separate finds of the various sepulchral groups have been subjected to a critical and searching analysis ; this has led them to recognize in these objects the products of a civilization intimately related to that of Troy, of which in fact, like that of the Cyclades, it was but the continuation. So striking does this correspondence and agreement appear to them, that Dummler goes farther in this direction, and is inclined to believe that such tribes as first buried in Cyprus the tokens of their laborious activity with the dead, came from the same stock as the clans that raised the Trojan walls. The racial quiestion will probably never be solved ; but this does not deprive the result of these investigations of their historical value. 1 AtJunische Miitheilungen, - Dummler, Mittheilungen von den gn'echisc/ien Inseln^ IV. {Athenischt Mittheil- ungen) ; M. Ohnefalsch Richter, Kypros : The Bible and Horner^ 2 vols. 4to, 1893. This last work, the result of well-conducted excavations covering over twelve years, is so ill edited that one is driven to the plates for elucidation, which it is hopeless to seek in the text. Moreover, it is not easy to grasp the reasons which counselled the order followed in the arrangement of the plates, whilst it is difficult to find the information one is looking for in the mass of irrelevant matter which fills up a great part of the book. He would have done better, both for himself and the jjublic, had he confined himself to the reproduction of the numerous monuments which he has either exhumed himself or seen exhumed, and which are as yet unpublished. Instead of that, he has engraved a whole range of figures to be found in older works, many of which have but a very distant relation to Cypriote art. By so doing, also, the exorbitant price of the book would have been greatly reduced.