The gold work of the period, chiefly stamped on thin bands, was not quite so crude as that of the potter with his triangle reversed for a body, the monstrous thighs and calves of his men, their bird-shaped inhuman faces,--all of them remote from the Aegean art, and apparently of northern origin. The artists in gold work were in advance of the vase-painters, whose horses usually have a thing like a fish for head, set on a neck like a serpent. The Attic region, towards the end of the Ionian migration, thus presents the decay of Aegean and the bloom of geometric decoration, and of barbaric, probably northern design. None the less the life depicted so barbarously was no barbaric life. Bad as is the art, you see that the life is Hellenic. At the same time the Dipylon life is wholly un-Homeric. The manner of burial, the huge vases in place of the cairn and pillar, the metal of the weapons, iron, their want of adornment, the size, shape, and mode of carrying the sword, the tearing out of their own hair by mourners, the size of the shields, and even the dress of the women who, in my opinion, wear skirts, not chitons, are all of a nature unknown to the Epics. Poets of the Dipylon age could never have preserved the uniform Homeric descriptions of details totally unlike what they saw in actual existence. About the relics of the earliest Ionian settlements in Asia, archaeology now knows something. The excavations of Mr. Hogarth on the earliest site of the Ionian temple of Artemis at Ephesus (700 B.C.?), revealed thousands of votive offerings in gold, ivory, bone, paste, crystal, and other materials. These had been "carefully laid between the slabs for some hieratic purpose," probably under the central statue of the goddess. Mr. Hogarth dates the deposit at about 700 B.C., "some two centuries after the traditional landing of the colonists."