Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/221

 Primitive Greece : Mycenian Art. The charred remains of the wooden threshold of chamber k were still in place. Little is to be made out of the two great masses M, N, of which foundations alone subsist. As towers, they may have flanked the north-east gate, or perhaps formed part of the rampart of the first or second period, ere this front of the enclosure was transferred farther east.' The peculiar mode of construction revealed 'by these ruins may be studied with much greater ease than could be done in the circuit-wall. Thus, stone substructures are everywhere surmounted by crude brick and limber ; the thickness of the walls in the principal building is one metre fifty centimetres, and the height of the stone sub- structure two metres fifty centimetres, one metre to one metre Flc 49. — Sloiie Eubstruduies of mud wall. thirty centimetres being taken up by the foundations (Fig. 49). At the head of the walls, right and left of the fore-chamber, the spade has uncovered sockets of limestone, in which rested uprights twenty-five centimetres at the side (Fig. 50), charred traces of which, nay even fragments, were still in place. The brick walls surmounting the substructures deserve careful descrip- tion. The squares of which they are made containing chopped straw and bulrushes, measured on an average sixty-seven centi- • These masses of masonry are now divided by a large excavation filled with river sand several metres high, forming a band which, in Diirpfeld's estimation, would correspond with the circuit-line enclosing the area on which rose the temple of Ilian Athene. The dimensions of the rectangular area bear a remarkable analogy with those which have been computed from the metope and the triglyphs discovered on the si>ot, out of which a reconstruction of the temple has been attempted.