DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9804#0124
CHAPTER VII
THE END OF THE BRONZE AGE
The full extent and meaning of the change in the /Egean
world that is illustrated for us by the burnt beams and
charred wooden columns of the corridors of Knossos must
be discussed later. For the moment it is enough to say
that the last of Mr. Evans's nine epochs which it intro-
duces, Late Minoan III., is that which has hitherto been
most closely associated with the word Mycenaean.1 Begin-
ning as it does shortly before 1400 b.c., it certainly docs
not close till the end of the XXth Dynasty in noo,
and perhaps stretches on another century into the
XXIst. Within it fall the objects found in the lower
town of Mycenae, and those cuttlefish " champagne
glasses " from Ialysos in Rhodes,' which the British
Museum authorities were so puzzled where to place when
John Ruskin presented one of them five years before
Schliemann dug his trenches at Mycenae. If ever we
secure a site continuously inhabited throughout it, and
admitting of stratification by successive floor levels, we
shall find that it will break up into as many subdivisions
as those eras which a few years ago we should have had
to class together as Pre- or Early Mycenaean. Its earlier
phases are represented by the majority of the hundred
tombs excavated in the already-mentioned cemetery of
Zafer Papoura, about half a mile north of the Palace of
1 Sco Mackenzie in J.U.S. xxiii. p. 201, and the interesting
article by Dawkins on the find of L.M. III. vases in the island of
Torcello, close to Venice, ibid. xxiv. pp. 125-8. See below, pp.
125, 157. 2 Dug up in 1868.
98
THE END OF THE BRONZE AGE
The full extent and meaning of the change in the /Egean
world that is illustrated for us by the burnt beams and
charred wooden columns of the corridors of Knossos must
be discussed later. For the moment it is enough to say
that the last of Mr. Evans's nine epochs which it intro-
duces, Late Minoan III., is that which has hitherto been
most closely associated with the word Mycenaean.1 Begin-
ning as it does shortly before 1400 b.c., it certainly docs
not close till the end of the XXth Dynasty in noo,
and perhaps stretches on another century into the
XXIst. Within it fall the objects found in the lower
town of Mycenae, and those cuttlefish " champagne
glasses " from Ialysos in Rhodes,' which the British
Museum authorities were so puzzled where to place when
John Ruskin presented one of them five years before
Schliemann dug his trenches at Mycenae. If ever we
secure a site continuously inhabited throughout it, and
admitting of stratification by successive floor levels, we
shall find that it will break up into as many subdivisions
as those eras which a few years ago we should have had
to class together as Pre- or Early Mycenaean. Its earlier
phases are represented by the majority of the hundred
tombs excavated in the already-mentioned cemetery of
Zafer Papoura, about half a mile north of the Palace of
1 Sco Mackenzie in J.U.S. xxiii. p. 201, and the interesting
article by Dawkins on the find of L.M. III. vases in the island of
Torcello, close to Venice, ibid. xxiv. pp. 125-8. See below, pp.
125, 157. 2 Dug up in 1868.
98