Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/154

 The Stone Age in Greece. >33 to objects of the stone age gathered together in Greece and Asia Minor." To these curious instruments, whose character and probable use are easily divined, may be added, by way of reminder, some pieces of no particular interest, whilst the object for which they were made is at present obscure. Schliemann published a kind of disk of granite, oval shaped, having a deep groove around its edge (Fig. 26) ; the groove can have served no other purpose save to insert a piece of cord ; it doubtless was a weaver's or a fishing-net weight. Finally, it is hard not to recognize missile-weapons, prob- ably sling bullets, in those oblong-shaped stones exemplified in Fig. 2 7. There is nothing to prove that they all belong to a primitive epoch ; for though lead displaced stone, we have no evidence to the contrary, that when metal failed recourse was not had to the older and more familiar weapon. This applies in full to whorls or fusaioles, thousands of which have come out of the ruins of the earliest cities. They are mostly of baked clay ; fusaioles of steatite and coloured stones, however, are by no means rare. Their purpose matters little ; what is specially important is that here as elsewhere, before they knew how to fashion, bake, and decorate a whorl of clay, they had to be content with a holed stone, so as to fix it to the cord it would stretch out. We think we have now pointed out the principal and most ' Not heeding, apparently, that the slabs in question lacked the needful sohdity to withstand a violent shock, in the first instance they were placed by A. Dumont among the axes {CoUtcfion prihiUorique de M. Finlay). In his catalogue, A. Martin refrained from any attribution {Revue anhiolopque, 1877).