DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0121
THE PRIVATE HOUSE AND DOMESTIC LIFE 79
It is hard to believe now that the hearth and the torch
afforded the only means of lighting known to the Mycenae-
ans, — that it never occurred to them to put to this use the
fat of the animals which they slaughtered for their daily food.
Nor was olive oil unknown, however rare it may still have
been, in Greece. Olive kernels have been found both at
Mycenae and at Tiryns; and, moreover, the wild olive is
native to Greece and often bears abundant fruit, from which
good oil could certainly be extracted. At the same period
oil was abundant in Syria; and at Thera, in the ruins of
houses far more ancient than the Mycenaean, along with
most primitive pottery, was found a stone apparatus which
is taken for an oil-press. Oil, then, could not have been
unknown, however little used. And the Mycenaeans kept
swine in great plenty, as well as other domestic animals
whose fat is found in use for lighting among people of far
lower civilization. It is the more surprising, then, to find
in the Homeric poems no mention of either oil or fat in this
use, but solely of torches and firepans.1 That the lonians,
down to the close of the Homeric age, were without any
other lighting, is incredible.
We are now (1895) in a position to maintain that the
Mycenaeans were not strangers to lamplight and that we
have actually found
lamps in one of
their chamber
tombs. One of
these is here repro-
duced from photo-
graphs, both in a
side view and as Fi^2!)" Stone Lanq.
seen from above (Figs. 29, 30). It is of stone (an ash-blue
1 SafSts and Xaixirrripes, as in Odyssey, xviii. 307 ff.
It is hard to believe now that the hearth and the torch
afforded the only means of lighting known to the Mycenae-
ans, — that it never occurred to them to put to this use the
fat of the animals which they slaughtered for their daily food.
Nor was olive oil unknown, however rare it may still have
been, in Greece. Olive kernels have been found both at
Mycenae and at Tiryns; and, moreover, the wild olive is
native to Greece and often bears abundant fruit, from which
good oil could certainly be extracted. At the same period
oil was abundant in Syria; and at Thera, in the ruins of
houses far more ancient than the Mycenaean, along with
most primitive pottery, was found a stone apparatus which
is taken for an oil-press. Oil, then, could not have been
unknown, however little used. And the Mycenaeans kept
swine in great plenty, as well as other domestic animals
whose fat is found in use for lighting among people of far
lower civilization. It is the more surprising, then, to find
in the Homeric poems no mention of either oil or fat in this
use, but solely of torches and firepans.1 That the lonians,
down to the close of the Homeric age, were without any
other lighting, is incredible.
We are now (1895) in a position to maintain that the
Mycenaeans were not strangers to lamplight and that we
have actually found
lamps in one of
their chamber
tombs. One of
these is here repro-
duced from photo-
graphs, both in a
side view and as Fi^2!)" Stone Lanq.
seen from above (Figs. 29, 30). It is of stone (an ash-blue
1 SafSts and Xaixirrripes, as in Odyssey, xviii. 307 ff.