Gardner, Percy: Sculptured tombs of Hellas (London, 1896)

CHAPTER V

asia minor : early

After the heroic or Achaean age we find in all branches
of Greek history a marked break. Some great cataclysm in
Greece, in all likelihood the Dorian conquest of Peloponnesus
in the eleventh and tenth centuries, separates the age which
is called Mycenaean from historic times. The young tree
of Hellenic civilization had produced a few flowers, but a long
period of comparative barbarism had to pass before it obeyed
a second time the call of the season and brought forth mature
fruit. This course of events is clearly mirrored in the graves
of Greece Proper. The tombs of the later Mycenaean age,
which have been discovered in great abundance, especially at
Mycenae itself, are far less rich than those of the earlier
period. And not only are their contents less plentiful and
less interesting, but they present us with no external adorn-
ment which should justify us in here dwelling upon them.
As our subject is the outsides rather than the insides of
sepulchral monuments in Greece, we must pass almost in
silence over a long period ot time, and begin again, amid quite
different surroundings, on the threshold of the Olympiads, and
of Greek history as opened to us by Herodotus.

There can be little doubt that if excavations were carried
out on a large scale on the coast of Asia Minor, amid the early
Aeolic and Ionic settlements, we should be able to bridge the
gap now existing between pre-historic and historic Greece.