Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/480

Metal. 423 where the men of old first began to mix tin with copper is unknown. If the inhabitants of Anterior Asia obtained their tin from the Altai Mountains before the Phoenicians brought it to them from Spain and Britain, it would be natural to suppose that Chaldsea preceded Egypt in the manufacture of this alloy ; for she was nearer to the mines of Khorassan,^ on the Persian frontier, where the source of tin is placed by some. Tin, burdened with the expense of transport from vast distances, remained long a rare and costly article, so that Trojan bronzes, like the oldest bronzes of the Delta, are very poor in tin ; they contain but from three to six parts of it per cent.^ Bronze appears in the second village under many forms. Tools and weapons were of stone ; but the chieftains already owned vases, instruments, and arms of brass. These gave them an enormous advantage over the rank and file, who were destitute of metal. Gold, silver, and lead are among the finds that have been exhumed from these ruins. Ingots of the precious metals, of nearly constant weight, were perhaps already used for the pur- poses of exchange. Schliemann found six flat bars of silver, shaped like knife-blades, thickly oxidized and stuck together, of the respective weights of 171 to 1 74 grammes,^ Should they not be considered as the fractions of the Homeric talent ? He traced no iron in the burnt city, during the whole of the excavations which are summed up in the Ilios. Two iron balls, which he picked up in 1890, were attributed by him to the second settle- ment ; * but remembering how the third village built itself over the second on a surface not previously levelled out, we can easily understand that objects belonging to the later inhabitants may have got mixed with the relics of the earlier population. A single find cannot upset the conclusions suggested by the earlier researches. The second village was unacquainted with iron ; its appearance in the Troad coincides with the third establishment, which, to judge from its pottery, was coeval with Mycenae. The civilization of the Cyclades, even where its pottery is still incised, as at Antiparos, is already in possession of bronze.^ ^ The mines of Drangiana mentioned by Strabo correspond as far as locality is concerned to Khorassan. 2 Schliemann, Ilios, ^ Ibid, -* Bericht^ 1891. ^ Journal of Hellenic Studies,