The extraordinary inferiority of the sculpture of Mycenae in comparison either with the architecture of walls and gates, or with the working of the gold and silver cups and ornaments found in the tombs, may at first surprise us. But in spite of this inferiority, there are touches of similarity between the representations on the stone and those in the metal plates which show them to belong to one age. We may account best for the curious discrepancy by reflecting how very closely art is dependent on material. The artists of Mycenae were evidently used to gold and metal work. They had learned to adapt their devices perfectly to a material which could be engraved and hammered. But to making reliefs in stone they were clearly quite unaccustomed. No mason who thought as a mason would attempt so absurd a task as the working out on stone of these spiral and interlaced patterns. They are taken straight from metal to limestone. And complete ignorance of the art of working in relief is shown also in the way in which the scenes are executed, each figure being quite flat, and the outlines only made clear against the ground of the relief. A distant report of reliefs in stone to be found in the lands of the far east and the south seems to have reached the workmen of Mycenae, and set them to work, when they naturally carried with them into the new branch of art the style of the _repoussé_ metalwork which was familiar to them. Even the Lion Gate of Mycenae, though a work of a character very superior to that of the tombstones, is very weak on the side of technique. CHAPTER V ASIA MINOR: EARLY After the heroic or Achaean age we find in all branches of Greek history a marked break. Some great cataclysm in Greece, in all likelihood the Dorian conquest of Peloponnesus in the eleventh and tenth centuries, separates the age which is called Mycenaean from historic times. The young tree of Hellenic civilization had produced a few flowers, but a long period of comparative barbarism had to pass before it obeyed a second time the call of the season and brought forth mature fruit. This course of events is clearly mirrored in the graves of Greece Proper. The tombs of the later Mycenaean age, which have been discovered in great abundance, especially at Mycenae itself, are far less rich than those of the earlier period. And not only are their contents less plentiful and less interesting, but they present us with no external adornment which should justify us in here dwelling upon them. As our subject is the outsides rather than the insides of sepulchral monuments in Greece, we must pass almost in silence over a long period of time, and begin again, amid quite different surroundings, on the threshold of the Olympiads, and of Greek history as opened to us by Herodotus.