Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/318

 TiRYNS. 293 more durable, down to its sculptured and painted decoration. We shall return later on to this peculiarity of the early builder. It is the trace of these so-called Cyclopsean walls, lately mistaken for ruinous mediaeval or modern structures, that I studied and followed three or four years ago in the Mycenian palace on the top of which a Doric temple had built itself in the sixth century b.c. ; a few weeks after I was shown them again, under the name of " Pelasgic walls," on the acropolis of Athens, where they had been covered by structures of the age of Cimon and Pericles ; finally, I beheld them at Troy, as they emerged under the spade of Schliemann's workmen, from moun- tains of rubbish. The fact that the peasantry of the Eastern world still build the walls of their houses and those fencing them in precisely the same style, is sufficiently accounted for on utilitarian grounds ; so easy and quick a way of going to work was likely to be retained. The remark applies to the situation occupied by the masonry under discussion in the lower part of the wall, where it came in contact with the humid ground. Above this species of plinth, large square bricks dried in the sun were piled up, both at Mycenae, Troy, and Tiryns. Shall we then refuse to believe the testimony of our own senses, and not admit that this style of construction was practised by the Hellenes at a very early date ? Finally, at Troy, where the middle portion of the wall is in a better state of preservation than at Tiryns, we could distinctly make out the traces left by longitudinal and sometimes transverse timbers, which the primitive builder had inserted into walls of rubble or crude brick. The coincidence extends further still. The Mycenian architect, like he of Orcho- menos, fetched from outside, whence, nobody knows, beautiful and precious stones, or deemed so because rare and seldom seen, which he added to the common ones he had at hand, constituting the body of his structure, in order that his surface should present a richer and more varied aspect. We find this same striving after effect in the two friezes above described ; one cut in alabaster, and the other carved in hard, green stone. Alabaster was used at Tiryns to adorn the lower portion of an inner wall ; the flagging of the Mycenian megaron was of the same substance. The same remarks equally apply to other parts of the building, where common materials alone were employed. Thus, the ground-sills of the principal doorways and the angles