The fourth Sepulchre was almost as interesting in its supply of Swords. Excavating from east to west, the explorer came upon a heap of more than twenty bronze blades, most of them with remnants of wooden scabbards and handles. The flat, round pieces of wood, and the small shield-like or button-like disks of gold with intaglio-work, seemed to have been glued in unbroken series along both sides of the sheath; and, the largest being at the broad end with a gradual diminishing in size, they determined the width. The wooden hilts bore similar plates of intaglio’d gold; the remaining space had been studded with gold pins, and gold nails were fixed in the large pommels of wood or alabaster. The quantity of fine gold-dust left no doubt that the handles and scabbards had been gilt. The smith evidently did not possess the knowledge of gilding silver: he first plated the metal with copper and then the copper with gold. The golden cylinder (No. 366), adorned at both ends with a broad border of wave-lines, and the field filled with interwoven spirals, all intaglio-work, probably belonged to a heft of wood. Along the middle runs a row of pin-holes; there are four flat pin-heads, and in the centre is the head of a larger stud by which it is attached. Sepulchre IV. also yielded forty-six bronze Swords, more or less fragmentary. Of these ten were short and single-edged: their solid metal measured when entire from two to two feet three inches in length. The handles are too thick for mounting in wood, and the tangs end in rings for suspension to the ‘Telamon’ or to the girdle (ζώνη, ζωστήρ). The chopper-shaped blade (fig. 246), evidently of Egyptian derivation, is broken at the point, which may incline either way, probably inwards. The other (fig. 246) is the normal leaf-shape. Dr. Schliemann believes[815] that they explain the Homeric φάσγανον, which he makes ‘perfectly synonymous with Xiphos and Aor.’ Here I venture to differ with him, holding the Phásganon probably to have been the short Egyptian Sword, used like the boomerang-blade for throwing as well as cutting. [Illustration: FIG. 246.—(Sepulchre IV. Mycenæ, p. 279.)] [Illustration: FIG. 247.—BRONZE LANCEHEAD (?), p. 279.] [Illustration: FIG. 248.—TWO-EDGED BRONZE SWORD AND DAGGER. (Sepulchre IV. Mycenæ.)]