Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/127

 98 Primitive Greece : Mycenian Art. or another, by paying special attention to the broken pottery that may be discovered in the Delian cave, or within the precincts of the temple. In this manner we should be able to determine whether such potsherds belong to the Mycenian or a later period. When the excavations at Delos took place, the far- reaching importance which attaches to this special field of inquiry was as yet very imperfectly understood, and Mount Ocha was left untouched by the spade. Was there in those far-off days aught answering to our notions of a temple ? Though unable to disprove it, one is inclined to doubt it. Primitive religion takes its being and inspiration from the mystery that surrounds death. Its temple is the tomb, within and above which are performed the rites which the family and clan render to their dead. We have shown how great a place such worship held in the life, the ideas, and thoughts of the societies whose history we are en- deavouring to re-constitute. When the citadel walls of Tiryns and Mycenae were erected, the Achaean clans had doubtless stepped beyond the initial period, when religion is no more than a simple fetichism ; they were on the high-road to poly- theism, and had begun to personify the forces of nature, under names which we know not, under semblances hard to grasp. Their minds were already busy in chalking out those divine types with which the Homeric tales have made us familiar. Inductions drawn from our knowledge of the laws which regulate the development of religious thought are corroborated at every turn by monumental testimony. It may well be that these types had not yet assumed enough consistency to have made the need felt of assigning to each god, or at any rate to the dis superis, special dwellings where they were fabled to live in regal state, like princes in their palaces. They may have been content to offer them, in open but enclosed precincts, the tribute of prayer and sacrifice, pouring the blood of victims, whether in a built pit, such as the slab circle at Mycenae (Figs. 102, 103), or the fenced enclosure in the court of the neighbouring house, or the inner square of the Tirynthian palace (Figs. 81, 82), or on one of those altars figured on the mural paintings of Mycenae and the glass-paste amulets (see tail-piece, end of chapter). In this way would be explained why temples have not been discovered on the sites of Mycenian