Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/157

 136 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. preserved among the products of any art or industry are the most riecent, those that have been exposed for a shorter time to the manifold risks which threaten destruction to the handiwork of man. Thus the finest specimens of stone-work have come from Troy, Tiryns, and Mycenae, towns where metal was already applied to all the usages of life. Primitive industry survived itself there, so to speak ; the objects which it continued to turn out were now but a make-shift which made good the insufficiency of work furnished by the smelter, the smith, and the goldsmith. But as long as it endured, its activity, though much slackened and in a moribund state, adhered to the processes it had received from far-off inventive and laborious ancestors. We used but our right, then, in calling in the testimony of jade axes and other instruments of the same class, found beneath the ruins of these famous towns, to complete the all too fragmentary information derived from chance finds on the soil surface, on points where no trace of ancient urban agglomerations has been preserved. In tumbling about the ruin of cities whose names often recur on the lips of the Epic bards, we descried a somewhat advanced society, in the midst of which groups more or less favoured by the natural advantages and other circumstances attending the sites they had chosen, attained, each group for itself, a development of varying degree, but which we are enabled to measure from build- ings partly preserved, and from separate finds discovered among these ruins and the adjacent necropoles. The resemblances observable between these buildings and objects, are sufficiently marked to lead us to place the scattered and successive work of all these small communities under a general denomination, embracing as it does the art and industry of clans that occupied the basin of the JEgtan during their transition period, when they shook off the trammels of barbarism. The passage from a semi- savage state to an almost settled condition was effected in the course of their countless migrations and movement to and fro, finally establishing themselves in positions which they were fated to keep for ever, and become the Greek nation. The bustling and progressive activity of these tribes seems to have com- menced on more than one point at once ; their efforts are visible on scenes apart from one another, yet not too distant to preclude their entering into relations of sufficient frequency and intimacy with each other as to have dowered their handiwork