A number of recent discoveries, a full account of which would take us too far from our immediate subject, have helped us to determine the date of the beehive tombs of early Greece. The earliest date indicated for them seems to be about the fifteenth, and the latest the tenth, century before our aera. They belong to the age of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of Egypt, when the land of the Pharaohs was more than once exposed to invasion by the powerful chiefs of the islands of the north. As the mists of the past are lifting, we gain a clearer and clearer view of a somewhat highly developed civilization in Hellenic lands at a time long before the Greece which is known to us came into being, of kings before Agamemnon, and palaces older and more splendid than those described in the Homeric poems. We may venture, though perhaps not without some trepidation, to ascribe the tombs of which we have spoken to the Achaean heroes whose fame still echoes in the earliest poetry of Greece; though it is certain that after their erection great changes had taken place in the country before the Homeric poems acquired anything like their present form. Our trepidation arises from the fact that the last word is certainly not said, nor the last theory put forth in this matter. The claims of the Carians and the Pelasgi to the remains of the Mycenaean age find adherents. Mr. Helbig, in an able recent work[54], has tried to prove that the contents of the Mycenaean tombs are almost entirely Phoenician. But the verdict of the majority of archaeologists goes in favour of the Achaeans, and the sober judgement of M. Perrot has accepted their claims in his great work on _La Grèce primitive_.