This is not only improbable on its face, but at variance with the facts. To take but one test, the Mycenæan Age hardly knew the use of iron; at Mycenæ itself it was so rare that we find it only in an occasional ornament such as a ring. No iron was found in the prehistoric settlements at Hissarlik until 1890, when Dr. Schliemann came across two lumps of the metal, one of which had possibly served as the handle of a staff. “It is therefore certain,” he says, “that iron was already known in the second or ‘burnt city’; but it was probably at that time rarer and more precious than gold.” In Egypt, on the other hand, iron was known as early as the middle of the second millennium B.C., and if the beehive and chamber-tombs at Mycenæ are to be assigned to a period as late as the ninth century, the rare occurrence of iron in them becomes quite inexplicable. _The Testimony of Art_ From the seventeenth or sixteenth to the twelfth century B.C., then, we may regard as the bloom-time of Mycenæan culture, and of the race or races who wrought it out. But we need not assume that their arts perished with their political decline. Even when that gifted people succumbed to or blended with another conquering race, their art, especially in its minor phases, lived on, though under less favouring conditions. There were no more patrons like the rich and munificent princes of Tiryns and Mycenæ; and domed tombs with their wealth of decoration were no longer built. Still, certain types of architecture, definitively wrought out by the Mycenæans, became an enduring possession of Hellenic art, and so of the art of the civilised world; while from other Mycenæan types were derived new forms of equally far-reaching significance. The correspondence of the gateways at Tiryns with the later Greek propylæa, and that of the Homeric with the prehistoric palaces, is noteworthy; so, too, is the obvious derivation of the typical form of the Greek temple, consisting of vestibule and cella, from the Mycenæan magaron. That the Doric column is of the same lineage is a fact long ago recognised by the ablest authorities. In fact, the Mycenæan pillars known to us, whether in actual examples as embedded in the façades of the two beehive tombs or in art representations, as in the lion relief and certain ivory models, while varying in important details, exhibit now one, now another of the features of the Doric column. Thus, all have in common abacus, echinus, and cymatium--the last member adorned with ascending leaves just as in the earliest capitals of the Doric order. Again, the Doric fluting is anticipated in the actual pilasters of “Clytemnestra’s tomb,” and in an ivory model. And as the Doric column has no base, but rests directly on the stylobate, so the wooden pillars in the Mycenæan halls appear to rise directly from the ground in which their stone bases are almost entirely embedded.