Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/364

 MvCENili. 337 hearth, built of crude brick mixed with straw, rising ten centimetres above the ground. The walls are still standing to a height of forty-five centi- metres ; they consist of small quarry-stones and of horizontal beams inserted in the masonry, and have no better binding than clay mortar. The inner face of the walls was covered first with a coating of mud, over which was spread another of lime. One of the twin jars found in a corner of the room is one metre thirty- two centimetres high. Like the building on the top of the hill, these houses were destroyed by fire. A flight of thirteen steps led from the great court b to a narrow passage two metres eighty centimetres below, opening on three chambers. These, to judge from the thickness of the walls, must have carried an upper storey, doubtless the women's apartment, and the exact counterpart of the megaron. The lower rooms in question were destitute of air and light, and unfit for human habitation. They were the cellars of the house. The floor consists of beaten earth ; there is no trace of cement on the walls, and several pithoi were discovered in an erect position, amidst accumulations of rubbish. The outline of the building can no longer be made out towards the courtyard ; but excavations have cleared it out on the west and south fronts, where it was skirted by a narrow footpath (d) and a stairway which ascended to the citadel and ran inside the boundary-wall p. The forms seen on the fragments of wall-painting which were found in the megaron belong to the geometrical style ; but the three figures with asses' heads, carrying heavy poles on their shoulders, were discovered on a wall to the south, near the stairs z. They are much the most important frescoes from Mycenae. Within the walls of another private house, at point g, almost on the solid rock, bone and glass buttons, amber beads, gold plates, carved ivory, etc., were collected, of which more anon. A number of small items have been furnished by the deep and broad layer of ruin and soil extending between the boundary-wall and the escarp of the hill on the south side. On the other hand, the clearing of a large edifice occupying the summit of the acropolis has hardly yielded any result. During the conflagration and after it, many a piece of wall must have rolled down the slopes of the hill with its contents, and when new erections were built on its narrow summit the debris handed to and fro by the VOL. I. z