Next to the walls of fortification the most numerous early remains
of the builder's art in Greece are the "bee-hive" tombs of which
many examples have been discovered in Argolis, Laconia, Attica,
Boeotia, Thessaly, and Crete. At Mycenae alone there are eight
now known, all of them outside the citadel. The largest and most
imposing of these, and indeed of the entire class, is the one
commonly referred to by the misleading name of the "Treasury of
Atreus." Fig 26 gives a section through this tomb. A straight
passage, A B, flanked by walls of ashlar masonry and open to the
sky, leads to a doorway, B. This doorway, once closed with heavy
doors, was framed with an elaborate aichitectural composition, of
which only small fragments now exist and these widely dispersed in
London, Berlin, Carlsruhe, Munich, Athens, and Mycenae itself. In
the decoration of this facade rosettes and running spirals played
a conspicuous part, and on either side of the doorway stood a
column which tapered downwards and was ornamented with spirals
arranged in zigzag bands. This downward-tapering column, so
unlike the columns of classic times, seems to have been in common
use in Mycenaean architecture. Inside the doors comes a short
passage, B C, roofed by two huge lintel blocks, the inner one of
which is estimated to weigh 132 tons. The principal chamber, D,
which is embedded in the hill, is circular in plan, with a lower
diameter of about forty-seven feet. Its wall is formed of
horizontal courses of stone, each pushed further inward than the
one below it, until the opening was small enough to be covered by
a single stone. The method of roofing is therefore identical in
principle with that used in the galleries and store chambers of
Tiryns; but here the blocks have been much more carefully worked
and accurately fitted, and the exposed ends have been so beveled