Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/423

 396 Primitive Greece : Mvcenian Art. the population wandered forth and settled on the declivities of Taygetus and the valley of the Eurotas,^ taking with them city names such as those of Leuctra and Arnee, together with a type of architecture peculiar to them.^ Does not the tomb which Pausanias calls the Treasury of Minyas, the greatest in size after the Treasury of Atreus, still arouse in the mind of the beholder a stupendous notion as to the wealth and power of the Minyans of Orchomenos ? The Do7)ied'Tombs of Attica, — The Acropolis /)f Athens. Discoveries never go single-handed. No sooner is an unex- pected find heralded from one point of the compass as offering some point of novelty, a type, a phase, or artistic form hitherto unknown, when fresh instances come to explain much that was obscure before, and bridge over chasms that had been accepted as irremediable for all time. The ball, once set rolling, never stops until the goal is reached ; confirming once more the dictum that he who seeks will find. This was emphatically the case with the Mycenian civilization. The unparalleled treasures yielded by the campaign of 1876 had hardly been ticketed in the Athenian Museum, when a landslip at Spata,^ a hamlet on the road to Marathon, close to and east- ward of Athens, uncovered a tomb resembling at all points the graves which Schliemann opened in the capital of the Atrida: ^ *E0i7/i#/OiC) 1 89 1. 2 Herodotus ; Straho. Ottfried Miiller has collected and commented on every scrap of evidence to be gleaned from ancient writers relating to the Achaeans and the Minyans of Laconia, in his work entitled, Orchomenos und die Minyer, ch. xv. The hope he threw out to the effect that fresh and systematic researches carried on at Amyclae would probably result in discoveries as full of interest as those at Mycenae, has been realized by the excavations of M. Tsoundas. E. A. KouMANOUDis and Kastorchis, with seven indifferent plates. Milchofer heralded the find in the AtJunische Mittheilungen, This was followed by a paper on the collection of antiquities which had just been discovered in Attica and was being formed at Athens, under the title. Die Graeberfunde in Spata (Athenische de Mittheilungen), The most important work is that which appeared in the Bulletin correspondence heiiinique, 1878, by Haussoullier, entitled, Catalogue descriptif des objets decouverts a Spata, The catalogue is accompanied by seven plates in photo- gravure, representing the more important objects.
 * The first account of the discovery appeared in the *A0^i'a<oi', written by