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 pottery. Such pottery, together with the chamber-tombs and beehive tombs, constitutes the most certain and decisive marks of this civilization. The vases, with a glossy painting which exhibits every variety of shade from yellow to dark brown, show such uniformity in technique, form, and ornamentation that they must have had a common source, whence they were carried by traders to the most distant shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

Since this characteristic pottery (fig. 35), in addition to the monochrome vessels of Trojan work, was found in the VI Stratum at Hissarlik, we can conclude that this settlement must have come in touch with the Mycenaean world.

 There is no longer any doubt that a developed form of written characters existed in the Mycenaean age. A. J. Evans has shown from the rich finds which he has made in Crete that there are two different styles of writing, the older of which is pictographic and reminds us of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, while the later is linear and resembles somewhat the alphabets of Cyprus and Western Asia. Symbols have been found on the handles of an amphora and of a stone vessel from Mycenae, on two amphorae from the beehive tomb of Menidi, in Attica, on a three-handled vessel from Nauplia, and on a stone pestle