The Coming of the Greekshave already been mentioned). Adjacent to the tholoi at these
two sites were graves of a "tumulus" type that recall both the
shaft graves at Mycenae and the kurgans of the Caucasus. At
Thorikos, on a great hill that overlooks a bay on Attica's east-
ern coast, a group of three tombs seems to bridge two centu-
ries. 73 A rather conventional tholos here, looted long before its
excavation, dates to the fifteenth century B.C. A second tholos
is architecturally unusual: it has a short dromos and an oblong
chamber. It appears to have been built in the LH i period (its
excavators date its construction shortly before 1500 B.C.). Al-
though it too was robbed, a fair number of objects—including
some in gold—escaped the robbers' notice. The grave goods
seem to parallel those from Graves in and iv of Grave Circle A
at Mycenae. Still earlier, and lying only five meters from the
Oblong Tholos, was a tumulus surrounded by a peribolos. The
burials under this tumulus, which was a grave circle of sorts,
were not distinguished by costly grave goods. So laborious
must have been its construction, however (the tumulus, even
without the peribolos, must have been the work of a great
many men), that the Belgian archaeologists who excavated it
have not hesitated to describe it as "royal." 74 The pottery dates
the tumulus to the same period as the earliest graves of Myce-
nae's Grave Circle B. The Thorikos tumulus yielded a great
deal of Gray Minyan Ware and seems to date from the very end
of the Middle Helladic or the very beginning of the Late Hel-
ladic period. The excavators concluded that the three Thorikos
tombs represent a single dynastic family.
Four tumuli have also been found at Vrana, at the edge of
the Marathon plain. 75 The latest of these dates from the LH IIIB- J. Servais and B. Servais-Soyez, "La tholos 'oblongue' (tombe
iv) et le tumulus (tombe v) sur le Velatouri," Thorikos 1972/1976 (Ghent:
Comite des families beiges en Grece, 1984; vol. 8 of the Thorikos reports),
6off. - Ibid., 64.
- On these, see S. Marinates, "Further News from Marathon,"
AAA 3 (1970): 155-63, and the same author's "Anaskaphai Marathonos,"
188