Throughout the whole of it, however, the Phoenician trading ships must have formed the chief medium of intercourse between Asia and Europe. Proof of this has been furnished by the rock tombs of Spata, which have been lighted on opportunely to illustrate and explain the discoveries at Mykenae. Spata is about nine miles from Athens, on the north-west spur of Hymettos, and the two tombs hitherto opened are cut in the soft sandstone rock of a small conical hill. Both are approached by long tunnel-like entrances, and one of them contains three chambers, leading one into the other, and each fashioned after the model of a house. No one who has seen the objects unearthed at Spata can doubt for a moment their close connection with the Mykenaean antiquities. The very moulds found at Mykenae fit the ornaments from Spata, and might easily have been used in the manufacture of them. It is more especially with the contents of the sixth tomb, discovered by Mr. Stamataki in the _enceinte_ at Mykenae after Dr. Schliemann's departure, that the Spata remains agree so remarkably. But there is a strong resemblance between them and the Mykenaean antiquities generally, in both material, patterns, and character. The cuttle-fish and the murex appear in both; the same curious spiral designs, and ornaments in the shape of shells or rudely-formed oxheads; the same geometrical patterns; the same class of carved work. An ivory in which a lion, of the Assyrian type, is depicted as devouring a stag, is but a reproduction of a similar design met with among the objects from Mykenae, and it is interesting to observe that the same device, in the same style of art, may be also seen on a Phoenician gem from Sardinia.[30] Of still higher interest are other ivories, which, like the antiquities of Camirus, belong rather to the second than to the first period of Phoenician influence. One of these represents a column, which, like that above the Gate of Lions, carries us back to the architecture of Babylonia, while others exhibit the Egyptian sphinx, as modified by Phoenician artists. Thus the handle of a comb is divided into two compartments--the lower occupied by three of these sphinxes, the upper by two others, which have their eyes fixed on an Assyrian rosette in the middle. Similar sphinxes are engraved on a silver cup lately discovered at Palestrina, bearing the Phoenician inscription, in Phoenician letters, "Eshmun-ya'ar, son of Ashta'."[31] Another ivory has been carved into the form of a human side face, surmounted by a tiara of four plaits. On the one hand the arrangement of the hair of the face, the whisker and beard forming a fringe round it, and the two lips being closely shorn, reminds us of what we find at Palestrina; on the other hand, the head-dress is that of the figures on the sculptured rocks of Asia Minor, and of the Hittite princes of Carchemish. In spite of this Phoenician colouring, however, the