BOOKS.
TIRYNS,
" TUE Prehistoric Palace of the Kings of Tiryns," is an im- posing title, in the style with which Dr. Schliemann has made us familiar, and is undoubtedly well fitted to excite popular expectation. How far the volume may be considered to realise
• 'Fillets, the Prehi toric Palace of the Kings of Tiryes. By Dr. Henry Behliemaan. The Profane by Professor F. Adler, and Co :tribe:ions by Dr. Win. Ddrpfeld. London : John Murray. 1886.
the visions called up by the title-page, will depend in no small measure on the reader's powers of faith and of imagination. In the language of sober prose, the contents of this balky and costly work might be concisely described as follows. It is an in- genious reconstruction, by a competent architect, Dr. Dorpfeld, of a large house, and of the walls surrounding it ; the remains of this house being so scanty, that, except thp principal features of the ground-plan, almost everything is matter of conjectural restoration ; and in this conjectural restoration the different particulars have very different degrees of probability. The house is certainly older than the sixth century B.C.; but beyond that nothing definite can be affirmed as to its date. It is also uncertain whether the builders were Greeks, or of some other race ; the opinion of Dr. Dorpfeld is that they were Phoenicians. In following his account, we gain some sound information on several points of ancient architecture, and have frequent occasion to admire the acuteness with which he draws inferences from very slight indications. This is the really valuable and interesting side of the book. Thus it appears that in so-called "Cyclopean "" walls, such as those at Tiryns, the stones were not merely large unhewn blocks—kept in place, without the aid of cement, simply by their own weight—but were roughly dressed, and bound with a clay-mortar. The Greek prop ylaeum—a gateway formed by setting two porches back to back, with large gates in the common back-wall—had not hitherto occurred in examples earlier than the fifth century B.C.; but those at Tiryns are older. The chambers, probably store-rooms, in the thickness of the fortress walls afford the first instance of that arrangement yet known except in the Phoenician colonies on the North Coast of Africa. Reasons are given for thinking that the principal hall of the house was lighted, like a basilica, by means of clerestory windows,—an expedient known to have. been used in the pillared halls of Egyptian temples, and one which the late Mr. Fergusson believed to have been adopted in the Parthenon. With regard to the materials employed, it is pointed out that the limestone is of two kinds,—one light-grey, the other reddish, in grain, the latter being much less durable ; breccia and sandstone were more sparingly introduced. The upper part of the house walls were of sun-dried bricks. Burnt lime was known, the wall- plaster being of pure lime, though the mortar used was only of clay and mortar mixed with straw or hay. Lime-mortar, Dr.. Dorpfeld says, was not used in early Greek times, except for aqueducts ; and hence, in Plutarch's account of the Long Walls (Ciazon, 13), he would render 262tiE by "gravel." Wood was used for the pillars, for the door-posts, for the upper parts of the parastades (antae), at exposed wall-ends, and, alternatively with stone, for thresholds. The floors were of lime concrete, painted (in some cases) with geometrical patterns. Fragments of plaster fallen from the walls attest the former existence of wall- paintings, in crude primary colours, and sometimes of vigorous,. if rude, execution. The fragment of a frieze, inlaid with bits of glass-paste, corroborate the conjecture of Helbig—for which a paper by R. Lepsius had prepared the way—that the Homeric yttiarag was the xt.;aroc encoucrr4 of Theophrastas,—a blue paste serving as an artificial substitute for the natural ultramarine obtained by pulverising the sapphire, or lapis lazuli (the ,diuroc airrogndu). A box-shaped terra-cotta drain-pipe, connected with the bath-room, resembles the pipes used in an aqueduct of the- sixth century B.C. at Samos ; though the inference of Dr. Dorpfeld that, because the Tirvns pipe is ruder, it must there- fore be older, seems open to question (p. 234.). From the- absence of clay-tiles, and from some other considerations, he draws the conclusion that the flat wooden roof was protected, merely by a thick layer of clay, as is still usual in village-houses of Asia Minor.
Such, in some of its chief points, is the story told by the- remains themselves, when closely examined by the science which Dr. Diirpfeld can bring to bear. So far, we are on com- paratively firm ground. If conjecture has an unavoidably large- part to play, at least Dr. Dorpfeld is a guide who generally inspires confidence. But it is quite another matter when Homer is brought into the discussion. As, at Hissarlik, the positive- results of excavation were perplexed by Dr. Schliemann's con- fused hypotheses about their relation to the Iliad, so at Tiryns he deems it necessary to prove that the plan of this ancient dwelling tallies with all the data of Homeric writ. The Pre- historic Palace at Tiryns must be exactly such a palace as the poet of the Odyssey imagines for Odysseus in Ithaca, for Alcinous in Scheria, and for Menelaus at Sparta. No doubt,
the house at Tiryns has this advantage, that we do not know even so much about any other house in Greece of an equally early age. But it is precisely for that reason that we should be on our guard against rash generalisation. Recent writers on the dwelling-houses of the ancient Greeks, such as Winckler, Buchholz, and Protodikos, are agreed in placing the women's apartments (thalamos) of the Homeric house behind the men's hall (megaron), and in supposing that a door led directly from the nzegaron to the thalamos. The literary evidence for this depends on a comparison of numerous passages of the Odyssey, especially in the last eight books, and is, in our opinion, as nearly conclusive as any evidence of the kind can be. It is further confirmed by the fact that the Greek house of the historical age, which in other general features was a derivative of the Homeric house, had the gynaeconitis behind the andron. At Tiryns, however, Dr. Dorpfeld supposes an entirely different arrangement. Smaller duplicates, so to say, of the men's megaron and the men's court (aule) are traceable there,—not behind the others, but parallel with them. Dr. Dorpfeld con- jectures that these were for the women, and that the only communication between the men's and women's apartments at Tiryns were by long and circuitous routes. This is conjecture only, for no objects have been found indicating that the smaller hall and court belonged to the women. At Hissarlik there are remains of ancient structures which, after having been otherwise explained in Dr. Schliemann's earlier volumes, were finally pro- nounced to be temples ; in Troja (p. 76) they figure as " Temples A and B." But, on the strength of the conjecture regarding the smaller hall and court at Tiryns, it is now ruled that "Temple A" at Hissarlik was the men's megaron, and "Temple B" the women's megaron. This is only one more illustration of the uncertainty surrounding the interpretation of the remains at Hissarlik which Dr. Schliemann calls "Troy." Dr. Dorpfeld allows the possibility that the Hissarlik "Temple B" was only "a smaller men's house;" but no such misgiving is admitted at Tiryns. Now, we will suppose that, in the case of Tiryns, he is right, and that the women's apartments were really where he places them. But is that a valid reason for assuming, against the evidence of the Homeric poems, that the same arrangern en t existed in the houses of which the Homeric poet was thinking.? Buchholz remarks (Homerische Beallen, II., 93) that the Homeric house had only one azde,--as is, indeed, pretty clear, if the indications in the poems are worth anything. Dr. Dorpfeld writes,—" This sentence is directly refuted by the palace at Tiryns " (p. 237.) Could anything be less warrantable than to argue from the scanty vestiges of a single house, of uncertain date and of uncertain origin, as if it were the universal and unalterable pattern to which, in every particular, every house of the Greek heroic age must have conformed ? Of a piece with this is the confident assertion that, because there were painted walls at Tiryns, therefore painted walls must have been known to Homer,—who, as Helbig remarks, never mentions plastered walls, but does mention another mode of ornamenting them, viz., by bronze plates.
Dr. Schliemann has " no hesitation in assigning the destruc- tion" of Mycenae and Tiryns " to the time of the Doric migra- tion"—say to 1100-1000 B.C. "We may assume with certainty that, since the destruction, in far prehistoric days, of the palace of the ancient Kings of Tiryns, its site on the upper citadel has never been profaned with human dwellings." Even Dr. Schliemann has seldom written anything more surprising than this. It would almost seem from this passage as if he had not read chap. v. (by Dr. Dorpfeld) of his own book ; for there Dr. Dorpfeld proves in detail that, "after the complete destraction of the older megaron," a reconstruction of the building was carried out, in order to adapt it to the requirements of habita- tion in later times (p. 229). Moreover, along with the pottery found at Tiryns, which Dr. Schliemann claims as primitive, objects occur which clearly are not older than the sixth century B.C. Such is the vase mentioned at p. 126, of which he is constrained to say,—" It is, in fact, very remarkable that we find this fragment among very primitive pottery, and it must have been in some way brought from another place"! Remarkable, no doubt, on Dr. Schliemann's theory ; but not at all remarkable, if habitation had continued on the site. No fact in history is better attested than that Mycenae and Tiryns still existed in 479 B.C., since their names occur in the contem- porary inscription on the bronze serpentine column now at Con- stantinople, among the Greek States which dedicated the tripod at Delphi. This agrees with Herodotus. Mycenae, he tells us,
sent men to Thermopylae in 480 B.C.; both Mycenae and Tiryns sent men to Plataea in 479 B.C. The Argives destroyed Mycenae and Tiryns in or about 468 B.C. This is stated by Diodorus, who had authorities going back to the fifth century B.C.; it is repeated by Pa.usanias ; and it is consistent not only with what we know concerning the temper and attitude of Argos, but also with the evidence of excavation on the sites. With regard to the " primitive " pottery itself, it is a well- known fact that rude and ancient types continued to be repeated down to a late period. Referring to some of the " prehistoric " pottery at Hissarlik, M. Dumont says (Cera»ziques, p. 8),—" It might belong to any epoch ; the form is already that which we shall find throughout the whole course of Hellenic civilisation." I fresh blow has been dealt quite recently to rash theories founded on " prehistoric " pottery by the discovery that the Greek colony at Naucratis in Egypt (settled only in the seventh century B.C.) did a brisk trade in the reproduction of older ceramic types.
It seems a pity that the exceptionally sumptuous shape in which Dr. Schliemann's portly volumes appear should place the useful elements in their contents beyond the reach of all but a few. Not many people can afford to pay two guineas for an account of excavations on the site of an ancient citadel,— excavations which are still incomplete,—for the lower citadel of Tiryns remains to be explored. If, for instance, the plans Ad illustrations of Tiryns were published separately, in a thin atlas of some thirty pages, all the valuable portions of the letter- press might easily be compressed into 150 pages of such type as this, and sold for half-a-crown,—as the explanatory text to Professor E. Curtins's Sieben Karten von Athos, is printed separatey from the atlas. It would be a boon to students if some competent person were authorised to weed the series of the indefatigable excavator's works—to purge them of the irrelevant or worthless matter—and to condense the residuum into a lucid and a reasonably cheap form.
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