Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/499

 472 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. unless weighty reasons compelled him to change his habits. Let us take as an instance the inner side of the front wall in which opens the Lions Gate (Fig. 184). Its original facing, arranged in horizontal courses, has disappeared and left a mass of irregular blocks. These we find again on both sides of the passage to which this gate gives access. Such a system of construction involved walls of enormous — at times of really astonishing thickness. The mean depth of the Tirynthian rampart is from seven to eight metres,. and fourteen metres on the southern face. According to Schliemann s measurement, the circuit at Mycenae averages four metres eighty centimetres in thickness,^ whilst Steffen makes it from three to seven metres, adding that here and there, on the southern front for example, the wall cannot be measured, but that its mass appears much greater, and pervaded with inner chambers and passages, as at Tiryns.^ The depth of the walls of all the structures depended on the size of the materials the builder had at his disposal. Thus, at Tiryns some of the blocks are of colossal proportions; elsewhere, in later and better constructed buildings, these same artisans gave proof of astonishing power served by rare cleverness, for the units are not only dressed fair, but even more gigantic than the great masses composing the rampart of the oldest citadel. The lintel over the Lions Gate is five metres long, two metres fifty centimetres thick, and in the middle of the bay more than one metre high (Fig. 99). But the largest stone ever set up by the Hellenes, is one of a pair of gigantic beams covering the passage which leads to the main chamber of the Treasury of Atreus. In length it measures nearly nine metres, by five metres in thickness and one metre in height. It represents forty-five cubic metres of calcareous conglomerate, with an approximate weight of 120,000 kilo- grammes. The subjects of Agamemnon were unacquainted with screw-jacks and pulleys, and must have used the lever, that most elementary of all appliances. As in Egypt and Assyria, the prodigious block had to be dragged by dint of strong arms and ropes to the foot of the structure, there to be slowly raised by means of rollers on an inclined plane, such as has been discovered in certain buildings of the Nile valley. Dr. Dorpfeld thinks that in all probability the quarry was ^ Schliemann, Mycence, 2 Steffen, Karten»