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Why it should be unlikely that a people confessedly familiar with writing used it for the preservation of literature, when we know that even the Red Indians preserve their songs by means of pictographs, while West African tribes use incised characters, is certainly not obvious. Many sorts of prae-Phoenician writing were current during the Mycenaean age in Asia, Egypt, Assyria, and in Cyprus.
On the whole, Homer does not offer a medley of the military gear of four centuries that view we hope to have shown to be a mass of inconsistencies but describes a state of military equipment in advance of that of the most famous Mycenaean graves, but other than that of the late "warrior vase."
But the age attaches itself in many ways to the age of the Mycenaean tombs, while, in our opinion, it stands quite apart from the post-Dorian culture. Where we differ from Mr.
The scholars who hold these opinions see that several things in the Homeric picture of life are based on Mycenaean facts; for example, the size of the shields and their suspension by baldrics. But the scholars also do steadfastly believe, following the Wolfian tradition, that there could be no long epic in the early period.
Why were they ignorant of small circular shields, which they saw every day? Or why, if they knew them, did they not introduce them in the poems, which, we are told, they were filling with non- Mycenaean greaves and corslets? This is one of the dilemmas which constantly arise to confront the advocates of the theory that the Iliad is a patchwork of many generations.
In the same way, if dealing with ornament, I would derive the spirals, volutes, and concentric circles of Mycenaean gold work, from the identical motives, on the oldest incised rocks and kists of our Islands, of North and South America, and of the tribes of Central Australia, recently described by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, and Mr. Carnegie.
The author's evidence as to the leather cap and its garnishing of boars' tusks testifies to a survival of such gear in an age of bronze battle-helmets, not to his own minute antiquarian research. Bronze greaves are not found, so far, in Mycenaean tombs in Greece, and Reichel argued that the original Homer knew none.
Ridgeway's theory, a northern people "Celts" who conquered with iron weapons a Pelasgian bronze-using Mycenaean people, it is not credible to me that Achaean or Pelasgian poets habitually used the traditional Pelasgian term for the metal of weapons, namely, bronze, in songs chanted before victors who had won their triumph with iron.
So conspicuous, in fact, does Mycenae appear in the light as well of archaeology as of epic, that it has become common, somewhat misleading though it is, to call a whole epoch and a whole civilization "Mycenaean." This "Mycenaean" civilization was widely extended over the Greek islands and the eastern portions of continental Greece in the second millennium before our era.
All these shields are manifestly post-Homeric; the first type is the most common in the Dipylon art; the third survived in the eighth- century buckler. No "practicable" breastplates, hauberks, corslets, or any things of the kind have so far been discovered in graves of the Mycenaean prime. But does this prove anything?
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