Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/312

 TiRYNS. 287 As our aim was to give a clear idea of the peculiarities of this unit, walls, here decidedly belonging to later times, there older than the palace itself, have necessarily been dropped out of our account, because they have nothing to do with the subject in hand. The lighter colouring adopted by Dorpfeld to indicate the more ancient walls has not been followed by us in PL II. These traces of an older epoch point to a primitive community domiciled here hundreds of years before the folk that built the palace, and probably also the enclosure against which it leans. Remains of this earlier hamlet were more particularly found in the south-west corner of the middle citadel (z), where, about three metres thirty centimetres below the bath-room,^ and under portions of the ramparts, a floor of clay concrete was discovered, along with partition-walls indicative of small chambers, and fragments of a rude monochrome pottery mounting back to the beginnings of the art of the ceramist. This lower stratum might be brought to light by breaking through the floors and pushing on to the solid rock ; but its poor feeble remains, void of character and interest, would ill repay the trouble ; whereas the plan of the palace, the decoration and the products of human industry found among its ruins, reveal a condition which has made considerable advance in cultured ways. Our interest is heightened because of the relations which we seem to perceive between the building exhumed by Schliemann and the Homeric palace, such at least as we picture it from allusions found in the Epic respecting the internal arrangement of the houses inhabited by Priam and Peleus, Nestor and Mene- laus, Alcinous and Ulysses. It seems best, however, to postpone our discussion in regard to the real character and close analogy of this mansion to the very similar buildings at Troy and Mycenae until the end, when we shall have gone over the remains found in superabundance in the latter city. The materials composing the walls of Tiryns are many kinds of stone, clay, wood, and lime. That which holds the largest place is a compact limestone, whence unsquared and squared blocks were obtained. The former, generally of gigantic dimen- sions, were used in the foundations and circuit-walls ; the latter went to the making of thresholds, bases of columns and antae, flights of steps, floors for bath-rooms, and the like. Breccia, that ^ Dorpfeld, Athenische Mittheilungetiy 1891.