nd while some restorations have been attempted here and there, chiefly
because of absolute necessity to preserve portions of the structure,
they are not such restorations as to jar on one, but exhibit a fidelity
to tradition that saves them from the common fate of such efforts.
Little or no retouching was necessary in the case of the stupendous
flights of steps that were found leading up to the door of this
prehistoric royal residence, and which are the first of the many sights
the visitor of to-day may see.

It is in the so-called "throne room of Minos" that the restoring hand is
first met. Here it has been found necessary to provide a roof, that
damage by weather be avoided; and to-day the throne room is a dusky
spot, rather below the general level of the place. Its chief treasure is
the throne itself, a stone chair, carved in rather rudimentary
ornamentation, and about the size of an ordinary chair. The roof is
supported by the curious, top-heavy-looking stone pillars, that are
known to have prevailed not only in the Minoan but in Mycenaean period;
monoliths noticeably larger at the top than at the bottom, reversing the
usual form of stone pillar with which later ages have made us more
familiar. This quite illogical inversion of what we now regard as the
proper form has been accounted for in theory, by assuming that it was
the natural successor of the sharpened wooden stake. When the ancients
adopted stone supports for their roofs, they simply took over the forms
they had been familiar with in the former use of wood, and the result
was a stone pillar that copied the earlier wooden one in shape. Time, of
course, served to show that the natural way of building demanded the
reversal of this custom; but in the Mycenaean age it had not been
discovered, for there are evidences that similar pillars existed in
buildings of that period, and the representation of a pillar that stands
between the two lions on Mycenae's famous gate has this inverted form.

Many hours may be spent in detailed examination of this colossal ruin,
testifying to what must have been in its day an enormous and impressive
palace. One can not go far in traversing it without noticing the traces
still evident enough of the fire that obviously destroyed it many
hundred, if not several thousand, years before Christ. Along the western
side have been discovered long corridors, from which scores of long and
narrow rooms were to be entered. These, in the publishe