We are pretty safe, therefore, in supposing this Mycenæan civilization to have flourished between the limits of 1600 and 1000 B.C. In this case it must have been contemporary with the great events of the New Empire in Egypt which followed on the expulsion of the Hyksos; with the victorious campaigns of Ahmes and Thotmes which carried the Egyptian arms to the Euphrates and to the Black Sea; with the rise of the Hittite power which extended far and wide over Asia Minor, and contended on equal terms in Syria with Ramses II.; and with the coalition of naval powers which on two occasions, in the reigns of Menepthah and Ramses III., commanded the sea and invaded Egypt. The mention of Achæans among the allies whose fleet was defeated in the sea-fight on the Pelusian mouth of the Nile, depicted on the triumphal tablet of Ramses III., becomes an historical reality, and some of the hostile galleys may well have been those of a predecessor of Agamemnon. It is doubtful, however, whether these Mycenæans or Achæans can be properly called Greek. Both their civilization and art are Asiatic rather than Hellenic; they have left no clue to their language in any writing or inscription; and the type of the race, as far as we can judge of it from paintings on the vases, was totally unlike that of classical Greece. [Illustration: QUEEN SENDING WARRIOR TO BATTLE. (From "Warrior Vase," Mycenæ. Schliemann.)] In one instance alone the human form is represented on the vases found at Mycenæ, viz. on that known as the great "warrior vase." This is a large amphora, with a broad band of figures round it, representing on one side attacking warriors hurling spears, and on the other a queen, or female figure, sending out warriors to repel them. The vase is broken, but there are in all eight figures with their heads nearly perfect, and all of the same type, which is such an extraordinary one, that I annex a copy of the woman and one of the warriors. One asks oneself in amazement, can this swine-snouted caricature of humanity be the divine Helen, whose beauty set contending nations in arms, and even as a shade made Faust immortal with a kiss; and this other, Agamemnon, king of men, or the god-like Achilles? And yet certainly they must be faces which the dwellers in Mycenæ either copied from nature, or introduced as conventional ideals. They cannot be taken as first childish attempts at drawing the human face, like those of the palæolithic savages of the grottos of the Vezere, for they are the work of advanced artists who, in other cases, drew beautiful decorations and life-like animals; and in these figures the attitudes, dress, and armour show that they could draw with spirit and accuracy, and give a faithful representation of details when they chose to do so. [Illustration: ADAM, EVE, AND THE SERPENT. (From a Babylonian cylinder.)]