I can now add important corroborations of these general conclusions from the researches made since the appearance of my earlier editions. I then said that the discoveries were too fresh and dazzling to admit of safe theories concerning their origin. By way of illustration I need only allude to those _savants_ (they will hereafter be obliged to me for omitting their names) who imagined that all the Mycenæan tombs were not archaic at all, but the work of northern barbarians who occupied Greece during the disasters of the later Roman Empire! Serious researches, however, have at last brought us considerable light. In the first place Helbig, in an important work comparing the treasures of Mycenæ with the allusions to art, arms, and manufactures in the Homeric poems, came to the negative conclusion that these two civilizations were distinct—that the Homeric poets cannot have had before them the palace of Mycenæ which owned the Schliemann treasures. As there is no room in Greek history for such a civilization posterior to the Homeric poems, it follows that the latter must describe a civilization considerably later than that we have found at Mycenæ. Placing the Homeric poems in the eighth century B. C. we shall be led to about 1000 B. C. as the latest possible date for the splendors of Mycenæ. But this negative conclusion has been well-nigh demonstrated by the positive results of the various recent researches in Egypt. Not only has the Egypt Exploration Society examined carefully the sites of Naucratis and Daphne, thus disclosing to us what Greek art and manufacture could produce in the sixth and seventh centuries B. C. (665–565 B. C.), but Mr. Flinders Petrie has enriched our knowledge by his wonderful discoveries of Egyptian art on several sites, and of many epochs, fairly determinable by the reigning dynasties. He has recently (1890) examined the Mycenæan and other pre-historic treasures collected at Athens, by the light of his rich Egyptian experience, and has given a summary of the results in two short articles in the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_.