gard to Egypt, the obligations of the two cultures were
certainly mutual; each influenced the other; it was not a case of
master and scholar, but of two contemporary civilizations, each
fully inspired with a native spirit, each ready to use whatever
seemed good to it in the work of the other, but both perfectly
original in their genius.

The question which was of such supreme interest to Schliemann still
survives, however, though in a wider and more important form than
that in which he conceived of it. It is no longer a question of
whether the graves which he found were actually those of Agamemnon
and his fellow-victims in the dark tragedy of Mycenae, but of whether
the people and the civilization whose remains have been brought
to light are, or are not, the people and the civilization from
which the Homeric bards drew the whole setting of their poems.
Were the Mycenaeans the Greeks of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and
was it their culture that is depicted for us in these great poems?

The arguments in favour of such a supposition are of considerable
strength. For one thing, we have the remarkable coincidence between
the geography of the poems and the localities over which the Mycenaean
culture is seen to have extended. The towns and lands which occupy
the foremost place in the Homeric story are also those in which the
most convincing evidences of Mycenaean culture have been discovered.
Foremost, of course, we have Mycenae itself. To Homer, 'golden,'
'broad-wayed' Mycenae is the seat of the great leader of all the
Achaeans, the King of men, Agamemnon; it is also the chief seat of
the culture which goes by its name. Orchomenos, Pylos, Lacedaemon,
Attica, all prominent in the poems, are also well-known seats of
Mycenaean civilization. Crete, whose prominent position in the Homeric
world has been already referred to, we shall shortly see to have been
in point of fact the supreme centre of that still greater and richer
civilization of which the Mycenaean is a later and comparatively
degenerate form. There is no need to enter into further detail; but
broadly it is the fact that the distribution of Mycenaean remains
practically follows, at least to a great extent, the geography of
the poems. The world with which the Homeric bards were familiar was,
in the main, the world in which the civilization of the Mycenaeans
prevailed.

The Homeric house also finds a striking parallel in the details
of the Mycenaean palaces whose remai