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vol. title: Miscellaneous Scraps from January 1st 1878 vol. period: 1875-1878 pages in vol.: 153 |
Greece Three Thousand Years Ago
While we are trying to save from perversion or destruction the republic, which has now lasted out only its first century, an enthusiastic scholar, forgetful of the present, is unearthing the remains of a civilization which existed three thousand years ago.
During this century, and especially during the last twenty-five years, we have revised our conceptions of the history of the peoples who, before the days of what has been regarded as authentic secular record, dwelt in the western part of Asia, and gave birth to a material prosperity and perfected language, which long anticipated those of the nations we now know as civilized. The excavations on the Tigris, at Ilium, at Mycenæ, and at Cyprus, attest the substantial foundation and even minute accuracy of the stories of Scripture, Homer, and Pausanias, which had gained credence through faith only, or were questioned as almost fabulous traditions. We find that Sardanapalus did indeed burn, with all his possessions and his luxurious court, in the manner the ancient narrators described; that his city was as they pictured it; that Babylon was actual in its extent and grandeur, and that it fell as depicted; that Priam and Achilles, Agamemnon and Menelaus, Clytemnestra, Æneas, and Paris, were real people, and that as Homer describes them and their deaths and misfortunes they really were.
The latest of these contributions to this most interesting study of antiquity is that of Dr. Henri Schliemann, the enthusiastic German antiquary, who is now prosecuting, under the favor of his own and the Greek Governments, important excavations on the site of the ancient city of Mycenæ in the Peloponnesus of Greece. His discoveries there, a brief telegraphic account of which we publish this morning, are among the most remarkable in the history of antiquarian exploration. On the 28th of November last Dr. Schliemann, with “unbounded joy,” informed the King of Greece of the surprising success of his labors. He thinks he has discovered the monuments of the Grecian heroes, of whom the traditions preserved by Pausanias make mention, and the palpable evidences sustain the truth of the stories so familiar to schoolboys. He has unearthed the tombs of Agamemnon, Cassandra, Eurymedon, and their companions, who were killed while banqueting at Mycenæ by Clytemnestra, the faithless wife of Agamemnon, and her paramour and his cousin, Ægisthos. Agamemnon had just returned from his successful siege of Troy, whither he had gone to assist his brother Menelaus in rescuing his abducted wife, Helen, the sister of the corrupt and murderous Clytemnestra, when he met his predicted fate.
Dr. Schliemann believes that he has not only found these tombs as Pausanias describes them, but that he has also unearthed in them, to use his own words, “immense archœological treasures, and numbers of articles of pure gold, sufficient to fill a large museum, and the most splendid in the world.” All these treasures, in the true spirit of an antiquarian, who desires no personal emolument, he turns over to Greece, and, as he says, they will become a new incentive to pilgrimages to that land so fruitful in interest to scholars and all who enjoy studying the developments of one of the most marvellous civilizations the earth has ever known.
Dr. Schliemann’s achievement will long make this year memorable.
Spontaneous Generation
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Editor's notes