Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/362

 Mycen^. 335 off their balance by the Mycenian monuments ; and scholars submitted to welcome an art and industry which had been hitherto unknown to them. In 1886, by the indefatigable care of the Archaeological Society, their representative. M. Tsoundas, who had succeeded Stamakis, lately deceased, as ephor of antiquities, not only re- opened the trench at Mycenae, but explored the upper and lower city as well, and carried on his investigations at other points of Greece, Laconia for instance, with brilliant success. His well- considered observations have been published from time to time, and testify to rare insight and a wide range of reading. He is worthy to take his place alongside of Schliemann and Dorpfeld. Like them he has succeeded in widening the field of our knowledge as to the prehistoric and forgotten culture of Greece, and to him redounds the honour of having made it more complete.^ Thus he simultaneously cleared the walls crowning the summit of the acropolis, which Schliemann's researches had pointed out to future explorers, and those skirting the circuit-wall south-east of the acropolis, near to the buildings unearthed in 1876, which Schliemann had christened by the high-sounding name of *' Palace of the Pelopids." It is needless to add that nothing about these structures justifies the ambitious title. The rooms are small and insignificant, with no outlet into a space which might point to extensive courtyards. The walls, though massive, can only have belonged to the outhouses of an adjacent palace, or rather to private houses. Those uncovered by M. Tsoundas here have nothing to distinguish them from the very similar buildings already known, at least in their oldest portions. Behind the massive block of masonry, forming a kind of tower on the south front of the enclosure wall (Fig. 90, a), erections squeezed in between the rampart and the side of the hill have been exhumed. That they belong to different epochs is proved from the fact that the walls cover and bisect one another obliquely instead of at right angles (Fig. 114). Out of this labyrinthine mass M. Tsoundas singled out the most important, which he has described and published. The space, a, paved with small stones overlaid with lime, ^ Tsoundas, ayaaKatpal MuKfiywv Tou 1886, in UpOKriKa, rijc £»' ^ASrjyttig apatoXo- yiKfiQ iratpuiQ tov irovg 1 886 (Pis. IV. and V.).