Furtwaengler and Loeschcke, _Mykenische Thongefässe_ (1879), and _Mykenische Vasen_ (1886); Dumont-Pottier, i. p. 47 ff.; Perrot, _Hist. de l’Art_, vi. p. 893 ff.; Pottier, _Louvre Cat._ i. p. 181 ff. General reference should also be made to Schuchhardt, _Schliemann’s Excavations_ (transl. E. Sellers); Schliemann’s own works; Hall, _Oldest Civilisation of Greece_; Tsountas and Manatt, _The Mycenaean Age_; and other works. We have already had occasion to deal to some extent with Mycenaean pottery in connection with Cyprus and Crete, but it is now necessary to review it as a whole in the light of the present state of our knowledge of this wonderful civilisation and its products. To enter here upon the wide and much-debated questions to which the discoveries of the last thirty years have given rise is of course beyond our province; but the pottery of the people to whom the name Mycenaean has been somewhat loosely given is of so homogeneous a character, although found in all parts of the Mediterranean, that it may be treated as a phase of Greek ceramics, independently of considerations of ethnography and chronology. First found in any quantity at Ialysos in the island of Rhodes, its exact position in the history of early art was not then recognised; but when the marvellous discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae became known to the world, including large numbers of similar vases, Sir Charles Newton readily recognised that the Ialysos vases in the British Museum belonged to the same class. It was not long before the whole number of vases of this type, now christened Mycenaean, was collected in a “Corpus” by two German scholars, with numerous illustrations; but since that time the excavations of “Mycenaean” sites in Cyprus and Crete must have doubled or even trebled the material available. The pottery at Mycenae was found in four different positions, implying consecutive chronological stages, ranging roughly from the fifteenth to the tenth or even ninth century. On these grounds Furtwaengler and Loeschcke[911] distinguished four main classes; but it will be seen that these are capable of even more subdivision. There are, in fact, two main classes, distinguished by the use of _matt_ and lustrous colour respectively; and of the first of these two, of the second four, subdivisions are possible. Class (1) is indeed comparatively rare,[912] and only found at Thera and in the oldest tombs on the Mycenaean Acropolis; it represents the transition from the pottery of Troy and Thera to that of Mycenae. The subdivision is a purely technical one: (_a_) vases of pale coarse clay, with patterns in a brown colour, some hand-made[913]; (_b_) wheel-made vases of a reddish and finer clay, the designs in black and pale red, occasionally white.[914] The decoration generally resembles that of the Thera vases, and animals occasionally appear. (2) The vases with lustrous painting may be classified as follows: