r
of the graves and the condition of the corpses was due, not to hasty
interment, but to the collapse of the roofs of the graves; the grave
furniture was shown not to belong by any means entirely to one period;
and the number and sex of the persons interred did not agree with
the legend, or with the account of Pausanias. Admiration turned
to incredulity, and even to undeserved ridicule of the enthusiastic
explorer; but the lapse of time has made critics less inclined
to mock at Schliemann's eager belief, and it is largely conceded
now that while perhaps the tombs may not be actually those of the
great King of the Achaeans and his friends, they are at least those
which were long held to be such by tradition, and which Pausanias
intended to denote by his descriptions. In any case, the question
of whether the explorer discovered the body of one dead King or of
another is of entirely minor importance. To find Agamemnon would
have been a romantic exploit thoroughly in accordance with the
bent of Schliemann's mind, and a fitting crown to a life which
in itself was the very romance of exploration. But Schliemann had
done something infinitely more important than to make the find
of a dead King, even though that King had reigned for more than
two and a half millenniums in the greatest poem of the world; he
had begun the resurrection of a dead civilization.

Besides the great discovery of the Shaft-Graves, Schliemann carried
on the exploration of the famous beehive tombs in the lower city
of Mycenae. One of these, the largest, was already well known by
the name of the 'Treasury of Atreus' (Plate V. 2). It consists
of a long entrance passage running back into the hillside, and
leading to a great vaulted chamber excavated out of the hill, and
shaped like a beehive. The entrance passage is 20 feet broad and
115 feet long, and is lined on either side with walls of massive
masonry which increase in height as the hill rises. This passage
leads to a vertical facade 46 feet high, pierced by a door between
17 and 18 feet in height, which was bordered by columns carrying a
cornice, above which was a triangular relieving space, masked by
slabs of red porphyry adorned with spiral decorations, while the
whole facade appears to have been enriched with bronze ornaments
and coloured marbles. The massive lintel of the door is 29 feet 6
inches long, 16 feet 6 inches deep, and 3 feet 4 inches high, with
a weight of about 120 tons--a mass of stone