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Late rhapsodists would not delve in the archaeology of the Mycenaean prime. Indeed, one does not see how they could discover, in Asia, that corslets were not worn, five centuries earlier, on the other side of the sea. We are told that Aias and some other heroes are never spoken of as wearing corslets.
Mycenaean vases and gold death masks stood upon the same shelf as Venetian goblets, and the mummy of an Egyptian priestess of the thirteenth dynasty occupied a sarcophagus upon the top of which rested a basrelief found in one of the shrines of the Syrian fish goddess Derceto, at Ascalon.
Their style takes on itself an almost bizarre freedom, which reminds us strongly of the similar characteristic in Mycenaean art. There is a strange little relief in the Berlin Museum of the king standing cross-legged, leaning on a staff, and languidly smelling a flower, while the queen stands by with her garments blown about by the wind.
The heraldic treatment of the lions is of Eastern origin. The Greeks had a tradition that the chieftains of Mycenae came from Lydia. The Treasury of Atreus is still more remarkable, not only because it shows more skill in building, but because its design is based on a structural motive which seems to have been wholly abandoned by the successors of the Mycenaean builders.
This misled modern archaeologists down to the time of Dr. Evans's discoveries at Knossos, though how these utterly un-Semitic looking Keftiu could have been Phoenicians was a puzzle to everybody. We now know, of course, that they were Mycenaean or Minoan Cretans, and that the Ptolemaic antiquaries made a mistake in identifying the land of Keftiu with Phoenicia.
But why did men who were interpolating bronze corslets freely introduce bronze so seldom, if at all, as the material of greaves? Evans calls "the Procrustean method" of Dr. Reichel. A curious feature about the spear may be noticed. No butt-spikes have been found in graves of the Mycenaean prime.
On the other hand, the dress and the shields of the men engaged in the lion-hunt are identical with those on a number of other "Mycenaean" articles gems, statuettes, etc. which it is difficult to regard as all of foreign importation.
That appears to be a natural set of sequences, but I cannot pretend to guess how the corslet fastened or what the mitre and zoster really were, beyond being guards of the stomach and lower part of the trunk. No helmets of metal, such as Homer mentions, have been found in Mycenaean graves.
He does not follow his model, Homer, in his descriptions of shields, swords, and spears. But, according to most Homeric critics, the later continuators of the Greek Epics, about 800-540 B.C., are men living in an age of iron weapons, and of round bucklers worn on the left arm. They adhere conscientiously to the use of the vast Mycenaean shield, in their time obsolete.
A.J. Evans: "Cnossus;" "Cretan Pictographs." Tsountas and Manatt: "The Mycenaean Age." "No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will." A man was born into the world, on the 22d of September, 1791, whose work was born with him, and who did this work so well that he became one of its greatest benefactors.
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