The presence of these numerous sepulchres near the Lions' Gate, and thus in the most prominent part of the citadel, in a place where one would have expected to find the king's palace, is very significant; the more so, as the slabs of the two parallel rows perfectly resemble the five unsculptured tombstones and the slabs of the twelve small reservoirs, and all these monuments appear to have been erected simultaneously. [Illustration: No. 156. Fragment of a perforated Terra-cotta Vase. (2½ M.) Actual size.] I know of no example in history of an acropolis having ever served as a burial place, except the small building of the Caryatides in the Acropolis of Athens, which was called the Sepulchre of Cecrops, the first king of Athens. But we now know with certainty that Cecrops is nothing else than Kacyapa or Cacyapa, who was a sun-god, and thus the story of Cecrops having been buried in the Acropolis is a pure myth. But here in the Acropolis of Mycenæ the tombs are no myth, they are a tangible reality. But who have the great personages been, and what immense services did they render to Mycenæ, to have received the signal honour of such a burial place? I do not for a moment hesitate to proclaim that I have found here the sepulchres which Pausanias, following the tradition, attributes to Atreus, to the "king of men" Agamemnon, to his charioteer Eurymedon, to Cassandra, and to their companions. But it is utterly impossible that Pausanias should have seen these tombstones, because, when he visited Mycenæ, about 170 A.D., all the sepulchral monuments had for ages been covered by a layer of prehistoric _débris_, from 8 to 10 ft. thick, on which an Hellenic city had been built and had again been abandoned about four centuries before his time, after having added a layer of Hellenic ruins, 3 ft. thick, to the deep stratum of prehistoric remains. Thus he could only have known of the existence of these sepulchres by tradition. In the Treasury close to the Lions' Gate the work advances but very slowly, the soil being as hard as stone, and only to-day has my trench reached a sufficient depth to enable me to begin the excavation of the triangular space above the door. My supposition that this Treasury would turn out to be nearly of the same size as the Treasury of Atreus seems to be confirmed by the width of the approach ("dromos"), which is in the latter 20 ft. 7 in., in the former 19 ft. 8 in., broad.