Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/ATH, IP address: 128.122.253.212 on 01 Jun 2015 MYCENAE 1939-1953 PART VII. A BRONZE FOUNDER'S HOARD THE bronzes described below were found about 0-20 m. below the surface in the central part of the Prehistoric Cemetery area excavated at Mycenae in 1952. (Cf. BSA XLVIII 6f., with pi. 2-hereinafter referred to without the volume reference.) They lay together in a small heap as though they had been buried in a bag of some material which had entirely perished. The numbers attached to the objects here are those of the 1952 excavation inventory. DAGGER 409 (pi. 3, d). Total L. 0-29 m.; tang 0-09 m.; W. at guards 0-04 m. Complete, but broken into five pieces.

The following paper was for the most part written early in 1939 and embodies the results of studies in Greece during the preceding year. Professor A. J. B. Wace, who suggested the subject to me, and to whom I am continuously indebted for encouragement and criticism, has elsewhere pointed out (notably, in collaboration with Professor Carl Biegen, in an article in Klio, 1939, 131 ff.) the need for a systematic and regional study of L.H. III pottery. The term covers wares produced over a period of at least three centuries (as long as from the reign of Charles I to the present day), and distributed over the Eastern Mediterranean from Sicily to Palestine. Within this wide range the existence of considerable variety has long been recognised, but not to any extent the nature of the variations, produced in part by the passage of time, in part by locally differing materials and traditions. This paper is an examination of what L.H. III pottery has come to light in one geographically well-defined region, Attica, and an attempt to discern the influences at work in its production, and its relation to similar pottery elsewhere.

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Among the burnt fill in Room 4 of the ‘House of the Oil Merchant’ at Mycenae excavated in 1952 was found one half of a stone mould for casting a winged axe, a type of implement (or weapon) otherwise unknown in Late Helladic or other contemporary Aegean contexts. The mould is made of a fine-grained grey stone. Its shape will be clear from the illustrations. The cut surface is flat, and measures 0·167 × 0·067 m.; the underside is convex: at the centre the stone is 0·038 m. thick, but at the ends only about 0·02 m. In one corner of the flat face is a small round hole, the socket for a peg or knob which would have projected from the other half of the mould (now lost) to ensure the two fitted correctly. There was probably a similar hole at the diagonally opposite corner, which has been broken away. This break fortunately does not prevent us restoring with certainty the shape of the casting that would be produced from the complete mould. This is shown below.Medial winged axes are common in the upper Danube basin and northern Italy, but rarely found farther south, and not at all in the Aegean. It is known from surviving hafts that they were usually mounted (on a knee-haft) as axes (i.e. with the cutting edge in the same plane as the handle), but they could equally well be mounted as adzes. The four ‘wings’ would be hammered round to grip the ends of the haft on either side; and the ledge or ridge (‘stop-ridge’) across the blade immediately below the wings served to prevent the butt end from driving upwards and splitting the haft.

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