Walter Scott’s friend, went there early in 1795 after visiting the Troad to participate in the Bryant controversy ( see here ), his is the first detailed account since Pausanias (in fact he used Pausanias’ writings as his guide!). Morritt was a keen traveller, ignoring hardships at a time when few travelled and fewer explored. Led by a ‘country labourer’, he reached the Lion Gate, admiring its ‘rudely carved bas-rilievo’. Mycenae, he thought, could have changed but little since Pausanias; in that he was probably right. Morritt also forced his way into the choked Treasury of Atreus and described the massive lintel block (‘beyond anything we have seen’) which he compared to the lintel at Orchomenos, another tholos tomb associated with the Homeric Age.
Morritt’s journal was made available to a number of scholars who followed him to Mycenae in the next thirty years. First and most controversial was Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, now notorious for his removal of the Elgin marbles. In the summer of 1802, while the marbles were being taken down from the Parthenon in Athens, Elgin made a tour of Greece searching forother antiquities; when he visited Mycenae he was so impressed by the ruins that he immediately began excavation there under cover of a permit from the Turkish government, which then controlled Greece. In the half-blocked entrance to the Treasury of Atreus he uncovered a number of pieces of the red and green marble friezes which had fallen from the façade of the tomb; he also found (perhaps in one of the other tholos tombs) two massive monumental fragments of a bull relief in hard black limestone which can be seen today in the British Museum. Elgin also removed the main portions of the green marble decorated zigzag half-columns which in 1802 still flanked the door of the tomb; the remainder were taken by the Marquis of Sligo in 1810 and set up at Westport House in County Mayo, to be given to the British Museum in 1905; that they are not today on the monument for which they were created (and of which they were an integral part) is greatly to be regretted. Elgin even cast covetous eyes on the magnificent relief on the Lion Gate itself, but decided reluctantly that it was too heavy and too far from the sea to be transported away.
Other visitors in those last two decades before Greek independence took a more constructive attitude towards the antiquities of the prehistoric age. Chief among them were English scholars, who examined, measured and drew the Treasury and the Lion Gate. Edward Clarke, whom we have already met at Troy, went there. William Leake, in his Travels in the Morea , set the standards for nineteenth-century classical topography with what is still one of the best descriptions of the site. Charles Cockerell made a small excavation on the outside of the roof of the Treasury of Atreus to establish the nature of its ‘beehive construction’. Edward Dodwell attempted to define Cyclopean architecture in a lavish folio volume which included the first illustrations of the walls and tholoi of Mycenae and Tiryns. William Gell, in the course of extensive itineraries all over Greece, sought out further fragments of the decorations and described the Lion Gate as the ‘earliest authenticated specimen of sculpture in Europe’. All these were significant steps in thegrowth of modern understanding of the Mycenaean civilisation; some, like Leake and Clarke, still deserve reading in their own right as marvellously observant travel books: Leake’s indeed is one of the best archaeological travel books ever written. These writers knew their classical sources, their Homer and Thucydides; it is thanks to them that, from the start of modern archaeological inquiry, these ruins were assumed to date from the prehistoric, ‘heroic’ age of Greece, and also that progress had already been made in piecing together ideas about the style of ‘Cyclopean’ architecture. The way had been prepared for Schliemann, and he
Morritt’s journal was made available to a number of scholars who followed him to Mycenae in the next thirty years. First and most controversial was Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, now notorious for his removal of the Elgin marbles. In the summer of 1802, while the marbles were being taken down from the Parthenon in Athens, Elgin made a tour of Greece searching forother antiquities; when he visited Mycenae he was so impressed by the ruins that he immediately began excavation there under cover of a permit from the Turkish government, which then controlled Greece. In the half-blocked entrance to the Treasury of Atreus he uncovered a number of pieces of the red and green marble friezes which had fallen from the façade of the tomb; he also found (perhaps in one of the other tholos tombs) two massive monumental fragments of a bull relief in hard black limestone which can be seen today in the British Museum. Elgin also removed the main portions of the green marble decorated zigzag half-columns which in 1802 still flanked the door of the tomb; the remainder were taken by the Marquis of Sligo in 1810 and set up at Westport House in County Mayo, to be given to the British Museum in 1905; that they are not today on the monument for which they were created (and of which they were an integral part) is greatly to be regretted. Elgin even cast covetous eyes on the magnificent relief on the Lion Gate itself, but decided reluctantly that it was too heavy and too far from the sea to be transported away.
Other visitors in those last two decades before Greek independence took a more constructive attitude towards the antiquities of the prehistoric age. Chief among them were English scholars, who examined, measured and drew the Treasury and the Lion Gate. Edward Clarke, whom we have already met at Troy, went there. William Leake, in his Travels in the Morea , set the standards for nineteenth-century classical topography with what is still one of the best descriptions of the site. Charles Cockerell made a small excavation on the outside of the roof of the Treasury of Atreus to establish the nature of its ‘beehive construction’. Edward Dodwell attempted to define Cyclopean architecture in a lavish folio volume which included the first illustrations of the walls and tholoi of Mycenae and Tiryns. William Gell, in the course of extensive itineraries all over Greece, sought out further fragments of the decorations and described the Lion Gate as the ‘earliest authenticated specimen of sculpture in Europe’. All these were significant steps in thegrowth of modern understanding of the Mycenaean civilisation; some, like Leake and Clarke, still deserve reading in their own right as marvellously observant travel books: Leake’s indeed is one of the best archaeological travel books ever written. These writers knew their classical sources, their Homer and Thucydides; it is thanks to them that, from the start of modern archaeological inquiry, these ruins were assumed to date from the prehistoric, ‘heroic’ age of Greece, and also that progress had already been made in piecing together ideas about the style of ‘Cyclopean’ architecture. The way had been prepared for Schliemann, and he
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