Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/52

 Pit-Graves in the Mycenian Citadel. 31 Did the Mycenians themselves invent that specious tale, or was it due to one or another of those precursors of Herodotus who, towards the end of the sixth century B.C., began to inquire into the antiquities of their nation, and to this end visited the several provinces of Hellas ? It matters little ; but whoever first put forward these names was unconscious of what the excavations have revealed to us, namely, that the number of the bodies contained in the graves was at least seventeen,^ and thus exceeds that of the superimposed stelse ; and that said stelae fall short of their original number.^ It would, then, be sheer loss of time to inquire how the victims of a successful treason could have been interred with all their riches ; the designations picked up by Pausanias must therefore fall to the ground as void of historical truth. The secret which the defective memory of the people suffered then to be lost, will ever remain a mystery to us. Yet the probabilities are in favour of the hypothesis, according to which the pit-graves would date from the beginnings of the kingdom ; that is to say, they would mount back to the Perseidae of whom Greek myth said that they had been the first to cast a wall around the Mycenian rock. General Characteristics of the Domed-Tombs. Whilst indicating our reasons for heading, chronologically at least, our list of funereal monuments with the pit-graves, we have thereby marked beforehand the place of the cupola-tombs. The situation they occupy in the lower city at Mycenae and elsewhere, whether in the plain or on the mountain slopes, where they are unfenced by walls, and for other reasons which it is unnecessary to repeat here, prove that they belong to the ripe age of Mycenian civilization, and that ancient local chiefs were buried in them. ^ Schliemann came upon fifteen corpses ; and two male skeletons were found in Tomb VI. {Myceme),
 * ^ Schliemann adverts to "a quantity of fragments of sepulchral stelae"