The construction of these chambered tumuli, so peculiar to our eyes, had its origin in the primitive mound-dwelling, survivals of which are still to be found among the Lapps inhabiting the extreme north of Scandinavia. Here, as Mr. Arthur Evans points out, ‘are the ring-stones actually employed in propping up the turf-covered mound of the dwelling, and there is the low entrance gallery leading to the chamber within, which, in fact, is the living representative, and at the same time the remote progenitor, of the gallery of the chambered barrow.’ The bee-hive tombs of Mycenæ are traced back by Professor Adler to Phrygia. Here, according to Vitruvius, the dwellers in the valleys dug a circular pit, raised a cone-shaped chamber with posts, covered it with weeds and branches; over all they piled a heap of earth, and cut a passage into the chamber from without. Of this Dr. Schuchhardt says: ‘The analogy is certainly significant. Men in all ages have fashioned the dwellings of the dead in accordance with those of the living; but the dead are conservative, and long after a new generation has sought a new home and a new pattern for its houses, the habitations of the dead are still constructed in ancestral fashion.’[46] The distribution of the spiral, which is so remarkable a feature at Newgrange, has in recent years received much attention from European archæologists. It was used in Egypt at a very early period. Dr. Flinders Petrie has discovered it on scarabs dating as far back as the fifth dynasty. It is now thought that the spiral reached Europe from Egypt northwards through the Ægean. Mr. A. J. Evans has found it in Crete on scarabs of the twelfth dynasty (2700–2500 B.C.), but its adoption in Mycenæan ornament from this early wave northward is doubted. Dr. Petrie considers that the intermediate stages so evident in Egypt are absent in Greece.[47] Evidence seems to show that its development in Greece was due to a wave of influence from Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty (1580–1320 B.C.). In Greek hands it attained the same degree of perfection as in Egypt, and has been found elaborately decorating the stelæ, gold ornaments, and vessels in the tombs of Mycenæ, in the alabaster frieze at Tiryns, and in the slabs of the ceiling of the tomb at Orchomenos.