Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/514

 Seconimkv Forms. 487 tions of these same shrines, akin to the small golden temples that came out of Tomb III. at Mycena; {Fig. in) and the Cypriote sanctuary just referred to ? We reserve our answer to a future chapter. If all the sills of city and sepulchral gates were stone, no such uniformity was observed in the thresholds of the habitation. These rang the changes between wood, stone, and bronze. We gather from the epithets XaiVoj, SpuiVoj, fjiiKivog, and ^Ahxios ouSo'f, used by Homer in regard to ground-sills, that he was acquainted with the three different kinds.' The results of the excavations at Tiryns have fully confirmed the poet's data, and if no bronze lining has been found, its absence is easily accounted for. In the palace have been traced, more or less distinctly, forty door- ways. Timbered sills are of course no longer in position, but their site is indicated by carbonized debris, and no less than twenty-two stone ones are in place.^ Two specimens of doorways, figured below, will help the reader to grasp their construction and arrangement. The first, Fig. 194, is the plan of the entrance to the women's megaron {PI. II, n). A huge calcareous block, two metres by one metre twenty-five centimetres, forms the sill. The threshold strictly so called, ninety centimetres broad by one metre sixty centimetres, has been worked up to a smooth surface, two centimetres above the irregular ends of the block. The small sides of the sill were connected with three blocks dressed fair and level with the ground ; the whole of the surface lying outside this band disappeared under the side blocks. Next to these come great sandstone masses, regularly cut, the form of • Odyssey; Iliad. ^ Schliemann, Tiryns.