Mycenae

Mycenae stands on a hill 274 metres above sea level in the north-east corner of the Argive plain, overlooking it and commanding the easy routes to the Isthmus of Corinth. The hill was occupied continuously from about 5000 BC.

Grave Circle B, dated about 1650 to 1550 BC, held ten cist graves in Middle Helladic style and several deeper shaft graves. Grave Circle A, of the sixteenth century BC, enclosed six shaft graves with nine female, eight male and two juvenile burials and richer goods than Circle B: engraved and inlaid swords and daggers leave little doubt that warrior chieftains and their families lay there, and the finds show strong Cretan influence from about 1600 BC. Burial in tholos tombs is seen as replacing the shaft graves, the older ones preserved with care as the tombs of ancestral heroes.

At a conventional date of 1350 BC the fortifications on the acropolis were rebuilt in the style called Cyclopean, after blocks so massive that later ages took them for the work of the one-eyed giants. Successive palaces stood inside, the last still traceable on the summit, centred on a megaron with a raised hearth ringed by four columns and a throne set against the side wall.

Around 1250 BC the wall was carried west to bring Grave Circle A inside the citadel, and the main entrance was rebuilt as the Lion Gate, its weight carried on a relieving triangle; the largest lintels and jambs weigh well over 20 tonnes and some may approach 100. A final extension around 1200 BC added a sally port and a corbelled passage running 99 steps down to a rock-cut cistern 15 metres below the surface. At its height in 1350 BC the citadel and lower town covered 32 hectares and held 30,000 people. A scarab of Queen Tiye, wife of Amenhotep III, was placed in the temple within the citadel.

Mycenae was among many Aegean sites destroyed in the Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BC. The causes are unknown, with enemy attack, internal strife and earthquake proposed. Unlike many, it was partly rebuilt, though no longer as the centre of a literate bureaucracy, and pottery suggests it regained some wealth before burning again.

A temple to Hera was raised on the summit in the Archaic period, and a Mycenaean contingent fought at Thermopylae and Plataea in the Persian Wars. In 468 BC troops from Argos took Mycenae, expelled its people and razed the fortifications. A brief Hellenistic resettlement built a theatre over the Tomb of Clytemnestra before the site was abandoned; visiting in the second century AD, Pausanias found a ruin whose walls and Lion Gate still stood.

In 1700 the Venetian engineer Francesco Vandeyk, surveying the Morea for Francesco Grimani, made the first correct modern identification of the site, matching Pausanias's description of the Lion Gate. He cleared part of the debris obscuring the gate and picked out the tomb now called the Treasury of Atreus, guessing it to be a king's.

In 1802 Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, came looking for antiquities to take to Britain; the Lion Gate relief proved too large to lift or transport, and so he had the voivode of Nafplio clear the Treasury of Atreus, and removed pottery fragments, ornamental stonework and a marble vase. In June 1810 Veli Pasha, Ottoman governor of the Morea, cleared most of the entrance, went in by ladder and took four large fragments of the semi-engaged columns, giving some to the Marquess of Sligo.

Heinrich Schliemann, convinced that Homer's stories rested on historical truth, began digging at Mycenae in 1876 hoping to find the grave of Agamemnon. He uncovered Grave Circle A and its six shaft graves, and named a gold death mask from them the Mask of Agamemnon; it is dated more than three centuries before the events of the Trojan War. His methods remain contested and critics have accused him of planting finds, though modern evidence suggests the material was genuine.

Christos Tsountas cleared much of the citadel across roughly two decades from the 1880s, and the British School at Athens dug under Alan Wace, assisted by Winifred Lamb, until 1955; Grave Circle B came to light in 1951. Finds are held in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and at the site museum. The Ministry of Culture is in charge of Mycenae, which was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 with neighbouring Tiryns; a scientific committee formed that year has carried out preservation and stabilisation work and laid out visitor walkways, and the Greek antiquities law of 2002 governs its protection.