For this reason Homeric Greece is strange to history; the relative importance of the states included in it, the centre of gravity of its political power, the modes of government and manners of men it displays, are all very different from what they had become in the time of Herodotus. But it is only of late that these differences have come to have an intelligible meaning. Until expounded by archæological research, they were a source of unmixed perplexity to the learned. The state of society described by Homer could certainly not be regarded as fictitious; yet it hung suspended, as it were, in the air, without definite limitations of time or place. These uncertainties have now been removed. The excavations at Mycenæ, undertaken by Dr. Schliemann in 1876, may be said to have had for their upshot the rediscovery of the old Achæan civilisation, the material relics of which have been brought to light from the ‘shaft-tombs’ of Agamemnon’s citadel, the ‘bee-hive tombs’ of the lower city, in the palaces and other coeval buildings of Tiryns, Mycenæ, and Orchomenos. The points of agreement between Homeric delineations and Mycenæan antiquities are, in fact, too numerous to permit the entertainment of any reasonable doubt that the poet’s experience lay in the daily round of Mycenæan life—of life, that is to say, governed by the same ideas and carried on under approximately the same conditions with those prevailing through the ancient realm of the sons of Atreus. The detection of this close relationship has lent a totally new aspect to what is called the Homeric Question, widening its scope at the same time that it provides a sure basis for its discussion. For this can no longer be disconnected from inquiries into the status and fortunes of the great confederacy, out of the wreck of which the splendid fabric of Hellenic society arose. The civilisation centred at Mycenæ covered a wide range; how wide we do not yet fully know: the results of future explorations must be awaited before its limits can be fixed. It undoubtedly spread, however, beyond Greece proper through the Sporades to Crete, Rhodes, the coasts of Asia Minor, and even to Egypt. The traces left behind by it in Egypt are of particular importance.[2] From the Mycenæan pottery discovered in the Fayûm, tangible proof has been derived that the Græco-Libyan assaults upon that country were to some extent effective, and that the seafaring people who took part in them were no other than the Homeric Achæans, then in an early stage of their career. The fact of their having secured a foothold in the Nile Valley accounts, too, for the strong Egyptian element in Mycenæan art; and the evidence of habitual intercourse is further curiously strengthened by the presence of an ostrich egg amid the other antique remains in the Myceneæan citadel graves.[3] Above all, the Egypto-Mycenæan pottery, from its association with other objects of known dates, is determinable as to time. And it appears, as the outcome of Mr.