United States or Svalbard and Jan Mayen ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Besides the great discovery of the Shaft-Graves, Schliemann carried on the exploration of the famous beehive tombs in the lower city of Mycenæ. It consists of a long entrance passage running back into the hillside, and leading to a great vaulted chamber excavated out of the hill, and shaped like a beehive.
The altar above the shaft-graves in Mycenae proves the cult of ancestors in Mycenae; of this cult in the Iliad there is no trace, or only a dim trace of survival in the slaughter of animals at the funeral. The Homeric way of thinking about the state of the dead, weak, shadowy things beyond the river Oceanus, did not permit them to be worshipped as potent beings.
Above the Shaft-Graves at Mycenæ stood a circular altar, where offerings must have been made either to the Shades of the Dead or on behalf of them, and the scenes on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, resembling so curiously those of the Egyptian ceremony of 'the Opening of the Mouth, suggest a belief in the continued existence of the spirit, either as an object to be propitiated by sacrifice, or as a being which needed to be sustained in its disembodied state by offerings of meat and drink.
Another variety of Mycenaean metal-work is of a much higher order of merit than the dramatic but rude relief on this silver vase. I refer to a number of inlaid dagger-blades, which were found in two of the shaft-graves. It is about nine inches long. The blade is of bronze, while the rivets by which the handle was attached are of gold.
They were found within a circular enclosure just inside the Lion Gate, above a group of six graves the so-called pit-graves or shaft-graves of Mycenae. The field, bordered by a double fillet, is divided horizontally into two parts. The upper part is filled with an ingeniously contrived system of running spirals. Spirals, apparently meaningless, fill in the vacant spaces.
Word Of The Day