of its painted decorations. It is impossible to say when this
style made its first appearance in Greece, but it seems to have
flourished for some hundreds of years and to have lasted till as
late as the end of the eighth century B. C. It falls into several
local varieties, of which the most important is the Athenian. This
is commonly called Dipylon pottery, from the fact that the
cemetery near the Dipylon, the chief gate of ancient Athens, has
supplied the greatest number of specimens. Some of these Dipylon
vases are of great size and served as funeral monuments. Fig. 44
gives a good example of this class. It is four feet high. Both the
shape and the decoration are very different from those of the
Mycenaean style. The surface is almost completely covered by a
system of ornament in which zigzags, meanders, and groups of
concentric circles play an important part. In this system of
Geometric patterns zones or friezes are reserved for designs into
which human and animal figures enter. The center of interest is in
the middle of the upper frieze, between the handles. Here we see a
corpse upon a funeral bier, drawn by a two-horse wagon. To right
and left are mourners arranged in two rows, one above the other.
The lower frieze, which encircles the vase about at its middle,
consists of a line of two-horse chariots and their drivers. The
drawing of these designs is illustrated on a larger scale on the
right and left of the vase in Fig. 44; it is more childish than
anything we have seen from the Mycenaean period. The horses have
thin bodies, legs, and necks, and their heads look as much like
fishes as anything. The men and women are just as bad. Their heads
show no feature save, at most, a dot for the eye and a projection
for the nose, with now and then a sort of tassel for the hair;
their bodies are triangular, except those of the charioteers,
whose shape is perhaps derived from one form of Greek shield;