mask has been formally questioned, primarily by William Calder III and David Traill. Archaeology magazine has run a series of articles presenting both sides of the debate. By the time of the excavation of the Shaft Graves, the Greek Archaeological Society had taken a hand in supervising Schliemann's work (after the issues at Troy), sending Panagiotis Stamatakis as ephor, or director, of the excavation, who kept a close eye on Schliemann. Proponents of the fraud argument center their case on Schliemann's reputation for salting digs with artefacts from elsewhere. The resourceful Schliemann, they assert, could have had the mask manufactured on the general model of the other Mycenaean masks and found an opportunity to place it in the excavation. The defending advocate(s) point out that the excavation was closed on November 26–27 for Sunday holiday and rain. It was not allowed to reopen until Stamatakis had provided the work with credible witnesses. The three other masks were not discovered until the 28th. The Mask of Agamemnon was found on the 30th. A second critique is based on style. The Mask of Agamemnon differs from three of the other masks in a number of ways: it is three-dimensional rather than flat, one of the facial hairs is cut out, rather than engraved, the ears are cut out, the eyes are depicted as both open and shut, with open eyelids, but a line of closed eyelids across the center, the face alone of all the depictions of faces in Mycenaean art has a full pointed beard with handlebar moustache, the mouth is well-defined (compared to the flat masks), the brows are formed to two arches rather than one. The defense presented prior arguments that the shape of the lip, the triangular beard and the detail of the beard are nearly the same as the mane and locks of the gold lion-head rhyton from Shaft Grave IV. Schliemann's duplicity, they claim, has been greatly exaggerated, and they also claim that the attackers were conducting a vendetta. Modern archaeological research suggests that the mask is genuine but pre-dates the period of the Trojan War by 300–400 years. Others date the contents of the find even earlier, to approximately 2500 BC. See also Achaeans (Homer) Teres I Notes References Behind the mask of Agamemnon, July/August 1999 Is the Mask a Hoax? op. cit. Insistent Questions op. cit. The Case for Authenticity op. cit. Not A