Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/273

 250 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. earliest settlement, it is doubtless because the ruins in their fall worked out a gully which was utilized for burial. The hill, for centuries, was sparsely populated, and during that time the adjacent villages must have used it as a common cemetery ; both on account of its being near at hand, and the ease with which a hole could be dug wherein to place the dead. It would be idle, then, to deny that incineration was practised here through long series of years, or that the hillock of Hissarlik does not enclose in its depths the ashes reverently collected out of many a funereal pyre ; but what we cannot accept is that the mound in question should be entirely constituted of such materials as were required for the performance of funereal rites, together with the accumulated dust of thousands of people. Granted the hypothesis under discussion, the spade ought to have cleared a mass having a general resemblance to a pyramid, provided with platforms on which to light pyres, and with funerary vases staged around ; in a word a mass necessarily with a base wider than its summit. So far is this from being the case at Hissarlik, however, that the several strata which go to the making of the mound have not inaptly been termed an inverted pyramid with a flat top, the hill having manifestly in- creased in width from settlement to settlement. Thus the lowest stratum resting upon the virgin rock is proportionately smaller than the one above it, and this goes on to the very top. But everything falls in its natural place if we suppose that several stages of habitations rose here one upon the other. As they decayed they sowed their ruins around, part of which slid down the slope of the hill and remained there ; and on these accu- mulations, in the course of time, houses were built. To this array of arguments may be added the strongest of all, namely, the close analogy observable between the larger build- ings of the burnt city and certain edifices of Tiryns and Mycenae, which have been proved to be the main chambers of a palace ; the Homeric megaron, of which we shall have more to say in the sequel. Boetticher however, nothing daunted, declared that Tiryns might well harmonize with Troy, since it was, like it, a fire-necropolis. Bases of columns that once had formed porticoes around courts and gateways, decorative fragments from the inner walls of palaces, were brought forward in vain ; he persistently maintained that porches and bays, friezes and metopes, all was