Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/345

 320 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. Nor is the excavation itself of uniform depth or size. Thus the side-walls of one grave are three metres in height, and five metres in another (Fig. 105); the smallest (No. II.) is barely two metres by two metres fifty-five centimetres ; but the largest (No. IV.) in length measures six metres seventy-five centimetres, and five metres in breadth. Accordingly, the former contained but one body, whilst the latter had five. With one exception the bodies were found apparently undisturbed, and surrounded by objects of all kinds placed there at the time of their burial : vases, gold ornaments, and weapons. Of the fifteen skeletons that were discovered, two or three belonged to women, and other two were infants. There they lay in their stony tene- ments, and over them had been piled pebbles, earth, schistose fragments, and much unconsumed wood. Many of the bodies showed no sign of cremation ; others at the first touch crumbled away into a blackish powder. Little heaps of a brown and powdery matter, which look like ashes, are certainly shown in the museum at Athens. But has not Schliemann more than once mistaken for human ashes vegetable matter which time and the weather had reduced to a black detritus ? He was firmly convinced that the human remains he had so unexpectedly exhumed were those of the Homeric heroes who had perished in the bloody drama enacted at Mycenae on the fall of Ilium ; the bodies of the Atridse, he concluded, had been consumed on a funereal pyre, attended with the ceremonies which Homer describes as having taken place over the corpses of Hector and Patroclus. Hence mouldy patches on the walls were thought by him to be traces of smoke left there by funerary rites.^ Had the bodies undergone cremation, all we should find would be a few ashes within small urns or caskets ; whereas everything about these corpses tends to prove that they had been laid intact in their graves : be it here a skull with circling diadem that adheres thereto,^ there, a thigh-bone surrounded by the golden band intended to adorn and fasten the greave^ ^ Stamakis fell into the same error in regard to signs left by cremation about the graves {Athenische Mittheilungen), His observations, though entitled to re- spect, do not carry conviction with them. At Mycenae he says that he found "traces of smoke in a single shaft-grave, and a number of human bones in the Herseum, which bear no sign of cremation." 2 Schliemann. ^ Ibid,