Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/159

 I ^8 Primitive Greece : Mycenian Art. o Here the expository method cannot be the same as when all we had to do consisted in carefully selecting a few examples of stone manufacture, calculated to give some notion of what had been attempted and achieved, within the limits of a region which was fated to be the exclusive domain of the Hellenic race. The points now to be examined are no longer concerned with the elementary industry of semi-nomadic and almost barbarous populations, but with the products of an orderly and fruitful activity. We are in presence of sedentary clans that have taken firm root on heights where, covered by fortified walls sedulously kept in repair and enlarged to accommodate an ever-increasing population, they make their first attempts at town life. Here are beheld important structures which imply technical knowledge and resources of no mean order, showing that their authors had left the age of infancy behind them. On the spots where the results of the excavations have been most satisfactory are found houses of ordinary dimensions, alongside of palaces and enormous ramparts soldered on to the rock forming the sides of ravines which they overhang, together with tombs brimful of glimmering gold and silver composing royal ornaments. The works of that early date have all many points in common, and the result is a general resemblance between them ; never- theless, as soon as we examine them in detail, we perceive features that serve to distinguish the products that reach us from Troy from those made at Tiryns or Mycenae, only to name the principal sites where antiquities of the class under consideration are most plentiful. Then, too, certain forms met with at one place are non-existent at another, because the objects are not all coeval, and that hundreds of years perhaps may very likely intervene between the oldest and the youngest. Other antiquities again, although contemporary or thereabouts, differ from one another for reasons of origin ; between the Troad and Argolis there is the breadth of the JEgean. Why assume that the march of progress was everywhere uniform and effected at the same time ? May there not have been intellectual inequalities of which we have no means of judging at this present date ? The Asiatic and European shores were not turned to the same winds or swayed by the same influences. Among those that prevailed more or less throughout the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, a certain proportion must have made their action more, strongly