Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/426

 Pottery. 371 extremely simple, as to look older than either the Trojan or the Thera style of pottery. They show no painting of any kind, and no attempt is made to imitate vegetable or animal forms, whether engraved or in relief; all we see is the herring- bone pattern,^ traced with the nail or a pointed tool. Holes for suspension appear in place of handles. The patterns incised on the island-fusaioles are less elaborate than on the corre- sponding examples from Troy. A single tomb at Amorgos has yielded no less than five hundred of these whorls ; but all are plain. Some specimens, however, reach us from Melos on which the style has traced an ornament composed of a series of chevrons.^ On the other hand, vast numbers of marble vases have been exhumed from these graves ; the shapes they exhibit are not without elegance, and recall those of the Trojan Fig. 451. — Stone jar. Height, 9 c. and Thera ceramics. Such would be a small jar of grey marble ; the craftsman has utilized a dark vein that runs through it to form a horizontal band around the body (Fig. 451) ; this gives the vase the air of being painted. Elsewhere he appears to have been inspired by metal-work, notably for two boxes (pyxides); the one discovered at Amorgos,^ and the other at Melos (Fig. 452). The ornament is the same in both ; it consists of scrolls arranged, like metallic wire, along the sides and the top of the box. The resemblance to a bronze piece is all the greater that one of the boxes is dark green, and the second deep grey. The interest of the specimen which we print below resides in the central design on one of the faces representing a house with a double-sloped roof. The fine hatched lines seen above the slanting beams which form the loft represent a bed of rushes ^ Bent, Researches among the Cydades (Journal of Hellenic Studies), - DuMMLER, Athenische Mittheilungen, ^ D iJ MMLER, Mittheilungen von den griechischen Inseln,