Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/149

 128 Pkimitive Greece: Mycenian Art. the introduction of metal; but because their place not only falls naturally here, but that they call up to the mind the image of those early days, when the instrument of which they are a reduced copy was in everybody's hands. The nature and use of another class of stone instruments are not so easily defined ; they are apparently a kind of stilettoes or drills of jade and ophite, and probably used to pierce holes into leather or thin planks {Fig. 15). From Sardes comes a pair of scissors very similar to the kind used by our carpenters ; one of the blades alone is grooved (Fig. 16). It is plain that hammers without pick, of which quite a large harvest is to band, can only have been used to break hard substances. Some have Fig. 17,— Hammers. Three-eighlhs oraclual a hole drilled through them (Fig. 17), but they form the exception, not the rule (Fig. 18). Undoubtedly most had handles, a few however, such as the massive instrument Fig. 19, lack this appendage ; an indentation in the middle enabled the hand to grasp and hold the implement. Both ends are battered by long usage. Rude balls, seemingly intended to bruise the grain on a flat stone (Fig. 20), were likewise void of handles. Grind-stones for obtaining meal came in much later. The stone pestles and mortars still used by the peasantry of Asia Minor, where mills are not obtainable, for pounding barley and corn into a coarse grit which they boil in milk, are not unlike those found at Hissarlik (Fig. 21). Truncated cones (Fig. 22), or objects more or less cylindrical in shape, should be recog- nized as polishers ; a concave curve about their middle facilitated