At Mycenæ in 1876 Dr. Schliemann lifted the corner of the veil which had so long enshrouded the elder age of Hellas. Year by year ever since that veil has been further withdrawn, and now we are privileged to gaze on more than the shadowy outline of a far-back age. The picture is still incomplete, but it is already possible to trace the salient features.… The name “Mycenæan” is now applied to a whole class of monuments--buildings, sepulchres, ornaments, weapons, pottery, engraved stones--which resemble more or less closely those found at Mycenæ. I think I am right when I say that archæologists are unanimous in considering them the outcome of one and the same civilisation, and the product of one and the same race.--WILLIAM RIDGEWAY. MYCENÆAN CIVILISATION[3] “Mycenæan” is a convenient epithet for a certain phase of a prehistoric civilisation, which, as a whole, is often called “Ægean.” It owes its vogue to the fame of Henry Schliemann’s[c] discovery at Mycenæ in 1876, but is not intended to beg the open question as to the origin or principal seat of the Bronze Age culture of the Greek lands. [Illustration: THE GATE OF THE LIONS, MYCENÆ] The site of Mycenæ itself was notorious for the singular and massive character of its ruins, long before Schliemann’s time. The great curtain wall and towers of the citadel, of mixed Cyclopean, polygonal, and ashlar construction, and unbroken except on the south cliff, and the main gate, crowned with a heraldic relief of lionesses, have never been hidden; and though much blocked with their own ruin, the larger dome-tombs outside the citadel have always been visible, and remarked by travellers. But since these remains were always referred vaguely to a “Heroic” or “proto-Hellenic” period, even Schliemann’s preliminary clearing of the gateway and two dome-tombs in 1876, which exposed the engaged columns of the façades, and suggested certain inferences as to external revetment and internal decoration, would not by itself have led any one to associate Mycenæ with an individual civilisation. It was his simultaneous attack on the unsearched area which was enclosed by the citadel walls, and in 1876 showed no remains above ground, that led to the recognition of a “Mycenæan civilisation.” Schliemann had published in 1868 his belief that the Heroic graves mentioned by Pausanias lay within the citadel of Mycenæ, and now he chose the deeply silted space just within the gate for his first sounding. About 10 feet below the surface his diggers exposed a double ring of upright slabs, once capped with cross slabs, and nearly 90 feet in diameter. Continuing downwards through earth full of sherds and other débris, whose singularity was not then recognised, the men found several sculptured limestone slabs showing subjects of war or the chase, and scroll and spiral ornament rudely treated in relief. When, after some delay, the work was resumed, some skeletons were uncovered