It is but a comparatively small number of the little glass vases with chevron patterns in our collections that have come from Egypt; up to the present time, however, no trace of their manufacture has been found in any other country; and although we cannot attribute so early a date as the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt to any of the little glass jugs and amphoræ found in Greek and Etruscan tombs, this ‘Mediterranean’ glass is in every respect subsidiary to the Egyptian series. GLASS IN THE MYCENÆAN AGE It would, indeed, be quite beside the mark to make a separate division for the glass of the Greeks, who for one reason or another appear never to have found much attraction in the material. This would at least seem to have been the case in Greece itself during the great centuries of Greek art, for nearly all the specimens of glass that we have from tombs of that time have been brought from more or less outlying lands, from Southern Italy, Sardinia or Etruria, above all from the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus, where the older culture long survived, and where Phœnician and Egyptian influences were strong. Such a statement, however, would not hold for the so-called Mycenæan Age. At that time glass was indeed a rare material brought by Phœnician merchants from Egypt, perhaps from Syria also. In some cases this imported glass may have been remelted and worked up again; it was certainly highly prized.[16] Perhaps the most striking instance of the application of glass to decorative purposes in Greece itself at this period, is to be found in the famous frieze discovered by Schliemann in the vestibule of the men’s hall at Tiryns. The pattern, carved in low relief upon the alabaster slabs, was heightened by studs of blue glass fixed into these slabs at intervals. Some of the roundels of this glass, forming the centre of rosettes, are as much as three-quarters of an inch in diameter. We have the authority of Virchow for stating that this is a soda-lime glass, coloured by copper—an analysis showed no trace of cobalt. On the other hand, cobalt has been found by German chemists in beads of an otherwise similar composition from Mycenæ and from the bee-hive tombs of Attica.