Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/493

 466 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. processes gave additional strength to the wall, as long at least as the timber was sound.^ Such a wall stands midway between rubble masonry con- tinued with crude brick, as practised at Troy and Tiryns, and masonry composed of great and small blocks, as we find in the passage and bee-hive tombs of Mycenee and Orchomenos. Whole bricks have not been traced in the Mycenian palace, where they seem to have been more sparingly used than at Troy and Tiryns ; yet enormous masses of clay strewing the floor of the men's megaron seem to point to a crude wall, at least in the upper part of it.^ The schistose blocks of rather considerable size — one is one metre thirty-five centimetres — with channelled edges found hard by, and which come from this same wall (Fig. 175), recall the similar units in the apparent part of the circuit, both in the lower city and the Lions Gate ; hence we are led to infer that the palace, the monumental tombs of the lower town, and the portions of the enclosure with marked tendency to horizontal courses, belong to a single epoch. Remembering that Mycenae remained an important centre down to the fifth century B.C., it is highly probable that in its wall we have the work of several distinct epochs, from prehistoric days onwards. The case is quite different for citadels such as Mideia and Tiryns, doomed from the outset, by their situation and narrow space, to play a minor part. The military genius of this or that chieftain may have raised the status of his native city for a season, but as the land became more thickly populated, supre- macy was fated to pass to townships in possession of greater natural advantages, Mycenae and Argos for example, where the advance of culture from age to age would place at the service of new wants more skilful processes, freer and bolder forms. In the wall of Mycenae, its explorers distinguish three modes of construction : namely, the Cyclopaean, the regular, and the poly- gonal ; specimens of the three systems appear in Figs. 92-94. If we compare the first with the second style, exemplified in the Mideian wall and the Treasury of Atreus, the difference between the two will appear very great ; in point of fact, however, they are very near each other. On the whole, the style of building, from the Tirynthian walls (Figs. 71, 72, 78) to the rampart gates ^ TSOUNDAS, UpokTiKa, ' Ibid.