DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0061
24 THE MYCENAEAN AGE
This primeval Tiryns — if we are to credit Eustathius —
was simply a fishermen's shelter, and so named Halieis.
It would he readily brushed away hy the Lycian giants, to
whom the neighboring limestone hills would offer good
quarries. Those quarries and certain blocks in the walls
still show us how they wrought. "The blocks of stone
(says Dorpfeld) were probably loosened by metal wedges or
simple pick-axes, the limestone being stratified in regular
layers and very loosely. Bored holes, which are found in
several blocks of the castle wall, prove, however, that the
stones were partly obtained by other methods. We sup-
pose that the holes, as well as the mortises in the pilaster
blocks, were made with toimbles, then filled with dry sticks
of wrood, and that finally, by wetting the wood, the stones
were cleft. Almost all the stones, before being used, had
been wrought on one or several faces with a pick-hammer.
Thus the walls of Tiryns must be spoken of as composed
not of unhewn, but of roughly dressed stones. And in
most places the several layers of stone run in pretty exact
horizontal lines."
After quarrying and dressing, these huge blocks had yet
to be transported the better part of a mile, and raised to
their places: a task requiring something like the force and
organization it must have taken to rear the Pyramids, with
which Pausanias declares these walls to be worthy of com-
parison.
In sharp contrast with Tiryns, Mycenae is a veritable
mountain fastness. Instead of morasses, a rocky, arid
Mycenae: region lies before it and two lofty summits rise
its site behind it, while the mightier mountain wall to
the north-west is broken only by the narrow defile through
which flows the Cephisus, followed by the wagon-road and
railway. The fortress rock itself, which rises to an eleva-
This primeval Tiryns — if we are to credit Eustathius —
was simply a fishermen's shelter, and so named Halieis.
It would he readily brushed away hy the Lycian giants, to
whom the neighboring limestone hills would offer good
quarries. Those quarries and certain blocks in the walls
still show us how they wrought. "The blocks of stone
(says Dorpfeld) were probably loosened by metal wedges or
simple pick-axes, the limestone being stratified in regular
layers and very loosely. Bored holes, which are found in
several blocks of the castle wall, prove, however, that the
stones were partly obtained by other methods. We sup-
pose that the holes, as well as the mortises in the pilaster
blocks, were made with toimbles, then filled with dry sticks
of wrood, and that finally, by wetting the wood, the stones
were cleft. Almost all the stones, before being used, had
been wrought on one or several faces with a pick-hammer.
Thus the walls of Tiryns must be spoken of as composed
not of unhewn, but of roughly dressed stones. And in
most places the several layers of stone run in pretty exact
horizontal lines."
After quarrying and dressing, these huge blocks had yet
to be transported the better part of a mile, and raised to
their places: a task requiring something like the force and
organization it must have taken to rear the Pyramids, with
which Pausanias declares these walls to be worthy of com-
parison.
In sharp contrast with Tiryns, Mycenae is a veritable
mountain fastness. Instead of morasses, a rocky, arid
Mycenae: region lies before it and two lofty summits rise
its site behind it, while the mightier mountain wall to
the north-west is broken only by the narrow defile through
which flows the Cephisus, followed by the wagon-road and
railway. The fortress rock itself, which rises to an eleva-