South African Archaeological Society

Art Treasures of GreeceSource: The South African Archaeological Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Jul., 1946), p. 67Published by: South African Archaeological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3887273 .

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67

making apprenticeship for a million years, man abandoned stone for metal. Bronze swords, knives, ploughs and musical instruments made their appearance and every decade found a new use for the novel medium.

Bronze Age man raised many monuments in stone, of which the monoliths and circles of Stonehenge are an example. It is the first engineers of this period, too, who designed and built the great pyramids of Egypt, a feat which would tax the abilities of any engineer to-day. In the early Bronze Age, or perhaps even in the late Neolithic, man had begun to use sledges to assist him in transporting loads, but not until much later did he make the fundamental discovery of the wheel. In this modern world of ours, where the principle of the wheel dominates every machine, it is difficult to conceive a world without wheels. We owe an eternal debt to the Bronze Age discovery of the forerunner of the gear and the pulley, and yet of all inventors it is probable that none gets so little credit as the venturesome maker of the first wooden disc.

Civilisation progressed and man looked for new metal better than the old. Three thousand years ago, iron was discovered and bronze gradually gave way to its stronger and more useful successor. Once again the new medium created new fields and so, with periods of brilliance and periods of dark despair, the Iron Age marched on. We live to-day in the Iron Age, or perhaps one might say the Steel Age, when the engineer creates in his new medium new machines, new tools and counter-parts of the age-old tools. As he holds in his hand the discarded flake or the lost implement of Stone Age mah, there is much over which the mind of the archaeologist may ponder. How remote does his motor-car seem from the ape-man's first crudely flaked pebble, but there lies in it the heritage of more than a million years.

ART TREASURES OF GREECE.

In a recent talk over the wireless from Athens, Kenneth Matthews described the way in which the treasures of ancient Greece were preserved during the war years. When war broke out classical examples of gold work, enamelled vases and pottery could be housed in the vaults of the Bank of Greece. But statuary proved more difficult. The Wingless Victory was placed in a cistern on the Acropolis rock and carefully bedded in sand before reinforced concrete was cast over the top. Many other treasures were hidden in the Prison of Socrates and in a second cave in the Hill of the Muses.

Both these caverns were similarly sealed with concrete a metre thick. Now the difficulty is to get the treasures out with- out destroying them. A pneumatic drill was tried on the cistern, but with little effect. Luckily it was realised that car- jacks would do the trick, and the slab was eventually lifted off in a solid block, and the Wingless Victory retrieved with- out additional damage. The Greeks are still trying to find a means of opening the two caves without blasting, which would entail risk, and without the ex- pensive process involved in laboriously chipping through a yard of concrete with a pneumatic drill,

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