[ca. 1600-1000 B.C.]
These sepulchres were richer in gold than any found elsewhere in the world, a fact which led to an absurd attempt to establish their kinship with the later and only less golden burials of Scythians or Celts. The metal was worked up into heavy death-masks and lighter breastplates, diadems, baldrics, pendants, and armlets, often made of mere foil, and also into goblets, hairpins, engraved with combats of men and beasts, miniature balances, and an immense number of thin circular plaques and buttons with bone, clay, or wooden cores. Special mention is due to the inlays of gold and niello on bronze dagger-blades, showing spiral ornament or scenes of the chase, Egyptian in motive, but non-Egyptian in style; and to little flat models of shrine-façades analogous to those devoted to Semitic pillar-worship. The ornament on these objects displayed a highly developed spiraliform system, and advanced adaptation of organic forms, especially octopods and butterflies, to decorative uses. The shrines, certain silhouette figurines, and one cup bear moulded doves, and plant forms appear inlaid in a silver vessel. The last-named metal was much rarer than gold, and used only in a few conspicuous objects, notably a great hollow ox-head with gilded horns and frontal rosette, a roughly modelled stag, and a cup, of which only small part remains, chased with a scene of nude warriors attacking a fort. Bronze swords and daggers and many great cauldrons were found, with arrow-heads of obsidian, and also a few stone vases, beads of amber, intaglio gems, sceptre heads of crystal, certain fittings and other fragments made of porcelain and paste, and remains of carved wood. Along with this went much pottery, mostly broken by the collapse of the roofs. It begins with a dull painted ware, which we now know as late “proto-Mycenæan”; and it develops into a highly glazed fabric, decorated with spiraliform and marine schemes in lustrous paint, and showing the typical forms, false-mouthed amphoræ and long-footed vases, now known as essentially Mycenæan. The loose objects found outside the circle include the best intaglio ring from this site, admirably engraved with a cult scene, in which women clad in flounced skirts are chiefly concerned, and the worship seems to be of a sacred tree.
This treasure as a whole was admitted at once to be far too highly developed in technique and ornament, and too individual in character, to belong, as the lionesses over the gate used to be said to belong, merely to a first stage in Hellenic art. It preceded in time the classical culture of the same area; but, whether foreign or native, it was allowed to represent a civilisation that was at its acme and practically incapable of further development. So the bare fact of a great prehistoric art-production, not strictly Greek, in Greece came to be accepted without much difficulty. But before describing how its true relations were unfolded thereafter, it may be mentioned that the site of Mycenæ had yet much to reveal after Schliemann left it. Ten years later the Greek Archæological Society resumed exploration there, and M. Tsountas, probing the summit of the citadel, hit upon and opened out a fragment of a palace with hearth of stucco, painted with geometric design, and walls adorned with frescoes of figure subjects, armed men, and horses. An early Doric temple was found to have been built over this palace, a circumstance which disposed forever of the later dates proposed for Mycenæan objects. Subsequently many lesser structures were cleared in the east and southwest of the citadel area, which yielded commoner vessels of domestic use, in pottery, stone, and bronze, and some more painted objects, including a remarkable fragment of stucco, which shows human ass-headed figures in procession, a tattooed head, and a plaque apparently showing the worship of an aniconic deity. From the immense variety of these domestic objects more perhaps has been learned as to the affinities of Mycenæan civilisation than from the citadel graves. Lastly, a most important discovery was made of a cemetery west of the citadel. Its tombs are mostly rock-cut chambers, approached by sloping dromoi; but there are also pits, from one of which came a remarkable ivory mirror handle of oriental design. The chamber graves were found to be rich in trinkets of gold, engraved stones, usually opaque, vases in pottery and stone, bronze mirrors and weapons, terra-cottas and carved ivory; but neither they nor the houses have yielded iron except in very small quantity, and that not fashioned into articles of utility. The presence of fibulæ and razors supplied fresh evidence as to Mycenæan fashions of dress and wearing of the hair, and a silver bowl, with male profiles inlaid in gold, proved that the upper lip was sometimes shaved. All the great dome-tombs known have been cleared, but the process has added only to our architectural knowledge. The tomb furniture had been rifled long ago. Part of the circuit of a lower town has been traced, and narrow embanked roadways conducted over streams on Cyclopean bridges lead to it from various quarters.
The abundance and magnificence of the circle treasure had been needed to rivet the attention and convince the judgment of scholars, slow to reconstruct ex pede Herculem. But there had been a good deal of evidence available previous to 1876, which, had it been collated and seriously studied, might have greatly discounted the sensation that the Citadel graves eventually made. Although it was recognised that certain tributaries, represented, e.g., in the XVIIIth Dynasty tomb of Rekh-ma-Ra at Egyptian Thebes, as bearing vases of peculiar form, were of Mediterranean race, neither their precise habitat nor the degree of their civilisation could be determined while so few actual prehistoric remains were known in the Mediterranean lands. Nor did the Mycenæan objects which were lying obscurely in museums in 1870 or thereabouts provide a sufficient test of the real basis underlying the Hellenic myths of the Argolid, the Troad, and Crete, to cause these to be taken seriously.
Even Schliemann’s first excavations at Hissarlik in the Troad did not surprise those familiar equally with Neolithic settlements and Hellenistic remains. But the “Burnt City” of the second stratum, revealed in 1873, with its fortifications and vases, and the hoard of gold, silver, and bronze objects, which the discoverer connected with it (though its relation to the stratification is doubtful still), made a stir, which was destined to spread far outside the narrow circle of scholars when in 1876 Schliemann lighted on the Mycenæ graves.
Like the “letting in of water,” light at once poured in from all sides on the prehistoric period of Greece. It was established that the character of both the fabric and the decoration of the Mycenæan objects was not that of any well-known art. A wide range in space was proved by the identification of the inselsteine and the Ialysos vases with the new style, and a wide range in time by collation of the earlier Theræan and Hissarlik discoveries. A relation between objects of art described by Homer and the Mycenæan treasure was generally recognised, and a correct opinion prevailed that, while certainly posterior, the civilisation of the Iliad was reminiscent of the great Mycenæan period. Schliemann got to work again at Hissarlik in 1878, and greatly increased knowledge of the lower strata, but did not recognise the Mycenæan remains in his “Lydian” city of the sixth stratum; but by laying bare in 1884 the upper remains on the rock of Tiryns, he made a contribution to the science of domestic life in the Mycenæan period, which was amplified two years later by Tsountas’ discovery of the Mycenæ palace. From 1886 dates the finding of Mycenæan sepulchres outside the Argolid, from which, and from the continuation of Tsountas’ exploration of the buildings and lesser graves at Mycenæ, a large treasure, independent of Schliemann’s princely gift, has been gathered into the National Museum at Athens. In that year were excavated dome-tombs, most already rifled, in Attica, in Thessaly, in Cephalonia, and Laconia. In 1890 and 1893 Stæs cleared out more homely dome-tombs at Thoricus in Attica; and other graves, either rock-cut “beehives” or chambers, were found at Spata and Aphidnæ in Attica, in Ægina and Salamis, at the Heræum and Nauplia in the Argolid, near Thebes and Delphi, and lastly not far from the Thessalian Larissa.