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It appears that this Stone-Age Ceramic of North Greece has no connection with the finds of South Greece, and is rather to be traced to the North and the civilization of the Danube valley.

The South presents us with a much more primitive picture. The large layer of Stone Age finds, which came to light in Crete, produced vases with incised geometrical ornament, alongside of coarse undecorated pottery, but curvilinear patterns of Thessalian type are completely absent and painted vases are rare. The reason for a less elaborate development of Neolithic civilization in Crete seems to be that it gave place to the Bronze Age comparatively

PLATE II.

Fig. 1. STONE AGE BOWL FROM THESSALY.

Fig. 2. FACE-URN FROM TROY II-V.

early: in Thessaly it seems to go down far into the second millennium.

According to these early vase finds one has thus to picture to oneself the beginnings of ceramic art. First, the most essential household vessels are fashioned by hand out of imperfectly cleansed clay, and burnt black in the open fire, and before long the outer surface is also polished, probably with smooth stones. Rectilinear ornaments are pressed or incised into the soft clay, and by degrees the method of filling and indicating the incised lines by a white substance is learned; the clay is also treated plastically, for instance channelled. Gradually the clay is made less impure, is more cleanly polished and more evenly baked in the oven, and by the actual firing has various colours, red, black, grey, yellow and brown, imparted to it. Thus a ground is also obtained for painting, on which the rectilinear ornaments are imposed with colour. Greater solidity and brighter colouring are obtained by covering the vase with a slip, which moreover sets off the painting excellently. The invention of the wrongly styled ‘varnish,’ a black colour glaze which, though technically undeveloped, appears even in North Greece of the Stone Age, is of the highest importance for the whole history of Greek vase-painting. The forms are primitive, little articulated, but already very various: the decoration covers uniformly almost the whole vase.