2

MYCENAE:‘RICH IN GOLD’

Where are the birth-places of the heroes?

   The few you see hardly break the plain,

I passed you by, Mycenae, and knew you,

   dead, more desolate than a goat-field,

talked of by goat-herds. ‘It stood here’ (said

   the old man) ‘covered in gold, the giants built it …’

Alpheios of Mytilene¹

The Mycenaean Age (c.1600–1100 BCE) played a critical role in the development of Greek mythology. Generally, the mythical significance/insignificance of a place tends to correspond to that which it had at that time. For instance, in Homer, Mycenae (Mykenai), with its stock epithet ‘rich in gold’, was extremely important.

The fact that Greek mythology and Mycenaean archaeology have to compensate for our lack of Mycenaean history makes life difficult. Yet it was with information of this sort that Mycenaean culture was first unearthed and named by Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90) in the 1870s. His archaeological and personal credibility is often questioned: he romanticized, exaggerated and distorted details of his personal life, looked almost exclusively for evidence to support his belief that Homer was ‘true’, and often missed or even destroyed crucial material. Yet his discoveries were astounding. He dug up the relics of a dynamically enterprising people who readily assimilated ideas from the likes of the Egyptians, Hittites and Minoans, ran with them, integrated them with their own society based on the Greek mainland, and created a scintillating and original new civilization.

  Mycenae itself stands on a rocky outcrop overlooking the fine agricultural land of the Argive plain, has a good water supply, and, though it is a little distance from the sea (visible from the citadel), with the city of Tiryns in between, has access to good landing places for ships. An extensive network of paved roads and strong bridges also facilitated communication with other areas. Yet the common question, ‘Where did the Mycenaeans come from?’ admits of no simple answer. It used to be asserted that the peace of Early Bronze Age Greece was shattered in around 2200 BCE by invaders, possibly from Anatolia, who destroyed the indigenous settlements and replaced them with their own, but ‘invasion theories’ carry little weight nowadays. A picture of gradual arrival, settlement, amalgamation, dispute and conflict might be less sexy than alien invaders or hordes of marauding barbarians, but it is probably more accurate.

During the Middle Bronze Age their civilization was pretty unimpressive. Skeletons reveal a mixed racial stock, strong and muscular, but suffering from childhood malnutrition, bad teeth, arthritis and malaria. The men were 1.60–1.70 m tall and lived to around 30–45 years old; women 1.48–1.56 m with an average lifespan of 25–40 years. But then, as we enter the Late Bronze Age, c.1600 BCE, we see greater prosperity, allied to contact with Egypt, Syria, Macedonia, the Black Sea, Italy and even Spain. The Mycenaean Age proper had begun (see Table 2.1, overleaf).

We can establish a reasonably well-defined relative chronology based on the stylistic development of Mycenaean pottery: thus ‘Late Helladic (LH) III B’ denotes the pottery in use at the height of Mycenaean prosperity in the thirteenth century BCE. The absolute chronology has been fixed by cross-referencing this material to Egyptian finds, the dates of which are generally accurate to within a few years. The Carbon-14 and dendrochronology dating methods contribute further to this process, but also have a tendency to challenge and confuse it. Some scholars like to divide the chronology of the Mycenaean Late Bronze Age into:

·         Formative period: LH I and LH II A (c.1575/50–1450 BCE)

·         Palace period: LH II B to III B2 (c.1450–1200 BCE)

·         Post-Palatial period, covering LH III C and ‘sub Mycenaean’ (c.1200–1050/1000 BCE).

Table 2.1 Mycenaean Chronology

Date	Period		Mainland Greece
BCE
3000	EARLY BRONZE AGE		Early Helladic
2000	MIDDLE BRONZE AGE		Middle Helladic
1600			Late Helladic I
16th century
1500		Early/	Late Helladic II
15th century		Formative
1450			Late Helladic II B
1400			Late Helladic I
14th century		Palatial
1300	LATE BRONZE AGE		Late Helladic III B
13th century
1200		Late/
12th century		Post-Palatial	Late Helladic III C
1100
11th century
1050			The End

These people were great bureaucrats. Thousands of inscribed clay tablets have been found, fired hard in conflagrations that occurred during the Mycenaean occupation of Knossos, and also at Mycenae itself, Tiryns, Thebes, Pylos and Khania. About half the signs on the tablets are similar to the earlier Linear A, suggesting verbal communication between Minoans and Mycenaeans, and the script became known as Linear B. It was deciphered by a British architect, Michael Ventris, (assisted by John Chadwick and others), who, on 1 July 1952, announced on BBC radio that the tablets were written in a difficult and archaic form of Greek. His theory was supported by the discovery in 1953 of a tablet that had ideograms of three-legged cauldrons of which the accompanying signs read ti-ri-po-de (tripods). So many tablets have now been discovered that even the handwriting of individual scribes can be identified.

Linear B is not literature; it was used to keep lists on long thin bars known as ‘leaf tablets’, the contents of which might be transcribed and collated on to larger, rectangular ‘page tablets’. The tablets show personal touches such as doodles, sketches and spelling mistakes, and the script is composed of nearly 100 different signs (see Table 2.2, overleaf), which can be summarized as:

1.     Decimal-based numerals (1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000);

2.     Pictograms, ideograms or logograms that indicate what is being counted. Sometimes they look like what they stand for, but they can be quite abstract: the head of a goat, sheep or pig, with a single line descending vertically with two short cross strokes, indicates a male creature; two vertical lines indicate a female.

3.     Syllabic signs that spell words. These can represent the vowels a, e, i, o and u; a consonant + a vowel (pa, pe, pi, po, pu); or a consonant + semivowel + vowel (nwa, dwo, etc.). Difficulties arise because, for example, pa can also sound as pha, or ba; ka as kha, or ya; ra as la, as in ancient Egyptian; extra vowels find their way into clusters of consonants; and final consonants are missed out. So ko-no-so = Knoso(s); a-re-kutu-ru-wo = the man’s name Alektryono(n); pe-ma = (s)pe(r)ma (seed); ti-ri-po = tripo(s) (tripod).

Table 2.2 Some Linear B Transcriptions

Linear B	Transcription	English	Linear B	Transcription	English
e-ra3-wo	elaiwon	olive oil	ko-wo	korwos	boy
qa-si-re-u	guasileus	chief	me-ri	meli	honey
i-je-re-ja	hiereia	priestess	pa-ka-na	phasgana	swords
i-qo	hikkwoi	horses	to-pe-za	torpezda	table
ka-ko	khalkos	bronze	tu-ka-te	thugater	daughter
ko-wa	korwa	girl	tu-ro2	turoi	cheeses

It is an inflected language in the same way as classical Greek, and there are two distinct dialects: one used by the scribes, thought to be upper-class speech; the other being closer to the speech-patterns of the lower classes. Personal names come through, too: Thyestes, Alexandra, Theodora, Glaukos (Grey-eyed), Ekhinos (Sea-urchin), Poimen (Shepherd), Khalkeus (Smith). At Pylos we find Orestes, Achilles, Tros, Theseus, and Hector, which proves that Homer was using genuine Bronze Age monikers, albeit those of workaday Mycenaeans, not mighty heroes.

Shaft Graves and Tholos Tombs

The decipherment of Linear B sent twentieth-century scholars into paroxysms of delight, but this pales into insignificance at the joy experienced by their late-nineteenth-century counterparts at the finds in the ‘shaft graves’ contained in Grave Circle A at Mycenae that were made by Heinrich Schliemann.² The older Grave Circle B was subsequently excavated in 1951. Both the Linear B tablets and the shaft graves prove that the presentation of the Bronze Age in the Homeric epics is often anachronistic: Homer’s heroes were cremated; Mycenaeans were buried. Initially this was in rectangular grave pits lined with stone slabs known as a ‘cist graves’, but from c.1620 BCE onwards, elaborate shaft graves were dug. These comprised a rectangular shaft sunk up to 2.5 m into the rock. A layer of stones was scattered on the floor, and then a chamber, roofed over with squared timbers with copper sheet ends, was created at the base of the shaft. This was frequently large enough for several bodies plus their grave goods. The shaft was filled with earth, and the grave marked with a stele (stone slab) up to 2m high. The graves were regularly reused.

There were 26 graves enclosed by the circular stone wall of Grave Circle B, including 14 royal shaft graves. Of the 35 individuals found, 22 have been studied by osteoarchaeologists and forensic scientists: 16 were adult males aged 23–55 years, with large hands and feet, and an average height of 1.71 m; 4 were female averaging 1.59 m tall; and 2 were children aged 2–5 years. They were of mixed racial stock, led active lives, and were quite a lot bigger than the Minoans. For example, the male Zeta 59 was tall, broad-shouldered and thick-boned, with an arthritic spine, a large head, a long horsey face, and depressions in his skull inflicted by a right-handed opponent – clearly he was involved in fighting. There is little sign of dental or infectious diet-related disease, although one male suffered from gallstones. Surprisingly, given that their pottery depicts marine life, they ate almost no marine foods. The electrum (a mixture of gold and silver) death mask belonging to Gamma 55 disappointingly showed very little resemblance to the face whose skull it was reconstructed from, indicating that the masks were not accurate likenesses.

Grave Circle B contained many items of gold jewellery, which has a ‘bling’-like quality, even though much of it is artistically second-rate. The high-quality items include a gold sword hilt and some finely ornamented sword blades; a gold cup; and an utterly exquisite rock-crystal bowl with an exceptionally delicate duck’s-head handle – a real masterpiece.

However, the finds from Grave Circle B are as nothing compared to what Schliemann had already found in Grave Circle A, a group of shaft graves used by a dynasty coming to power c.1600– 1500 BCE. The two Grave Circles overlap chronologically, with Circle A being used for a generation longer.

Grave Circle A, as we have it, was the product of a rebuilding programme during the thirteenth century BCE. It comprises a roughly circular, hollow parapet of limestone slabs with a formal entrance, enclosing some ordinary graves and six large shaft graves, deeper and larger than those in Circle B, and cut into the bedrock. A seventh, similar grave, stood outside the circle. The six family tombs each have several occupants, usually laid with their heads to the east and feet to the west in a chamber roofed with twigs and branches and covered with a layer of clay and slate slabs.

Each grave was marked by a west-facing sandstone stele that was either plain or sculpted, generally with battle or hunting scenes, one of which depicts a charioteer hurtling in the direction of an individual holding a sword, thought by some to represent funeral games. The remains of eight men, nine women and two children were discovered. The males are 25–45 years of age, and stand 1.65–1.83 m tall – just half a centimetre shorter than the average modern Greek. They have a similar muscularity to the occupants of Grave Circle B, ate a mixture of meat and plants, got about 20 per cent of their protein from marine foods, and between them exhibit osteoporosis, arthritis of the spine, and a well-healed fractured vertebra.

There are those who think that Schliemann may have ‘sexed up’ some of the graves with finds from elsewhere in order to intensify interest in himself and his work, although the case against him is by no means conclusive. In a telegram dated 28 November 1876 to King George of Greece, he confidently asserted:

I have discovered the tombs which the tradition proclaimed by Pausanias indicates as the graves of Agamemnon, Cassandra, Eurymedon and their companions, all slain at a banquet by Clytemnestra (Agamemnon’s wife) and her lover Aegisthus.³

If they were authentic, Schliemann’s finds were stunning. Five of the males had burial masks made of hammered gold sheets. One had a splendid gold breastplate decorated with spirals, and a gold mask showing an aquiline face with a beard and a moustache, which has become known as the ‘mask of Agamemnon’, even though it was another occupant of the same grave that Schliemann believed to be the great king. That extraordinarily well-preserved body became known as the ‘shaft grave mummy’ (even though it had not been mummified), and in a telegram to a Greek newspaper, Schliemann said: ‘This corpse very much resembles the image which my imagination formed long ago of wide-ruling Agamemnon’,⁴ later abbreviated to the apocryphal but catchy, ‘Today I gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.’

Other grave goods included elaborate necklaces, earrings, rosettes, ornaments originally attached to the funeral shrouds, a large woman’s crown decorated in the repoussé technique of hammering gold (and silver) from the inside, and some plain gold sheets covering the bodies of the children who were buried with the three women in Grave III. There were ceremonial swords with hilts decorated with gold plate or discs, whilst others had ivory or marble pommels, and a dagger, the blade of which is inlaid with gold, silver and black enamel (an alloy of silver and sulphur frequently referred to as niello), shows warriors hunting lions on one side, and a lion hunting antelope on the other.

Also for ceremonial use was a rhyton (= conical ritual drinking vessel) in the form of a lion’s head made of sheet gold; a Minoan-influenced one with a silver bull’s head with gilded horns; a stag-shaped rhyton imported from the Hittite civilization; and the silver ‘siege rhyton’, decorated with repoussé scenes of soldiers assaulting a city. Mycenaean metallurgy also encompassed the techniques of granulation (using tiny droplets of gold to decorate objects) and cloisonné (soldering a pattern of fine wire on to a base plate and setting it with inlays of stone or glass) to produce objects of astonishing delicacy.

Drinking cups of gold and silver included the so-called Cup of Nestor, which resembles in some ways, if not in size, the description of the depas amphikypellon used by Nestor in the Iliad:

It was set with golden nails, the eared handles upon it

were four, and on either side there were fashioned two doves

of gold, feeding, and there were double bases beneath it.

Another man with great effort could lift it full from the table,

but Nestor, aged as he was, lifted it without strain.⁵

Imported luxury items also included amber from northern Europe; ostrich eggs from North Africa; ivory from Egypt or Syria; Cretan stone vases; and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan.

In about 1490 BCE (LH II A) the Mycenaean elite stopped using shaft graves and opted for more imposing tholos tombs (popularly known as ‘beehive’ tombs). Nine of these have been excavated outside the citadel of Mycenae, but none have the engineering and aesthetic sophistication of the ‘Treasury of Atreus’,⁶ built around 1410 BCE. This is approached by a 39 m long dromos (entrance passage; pl. dromoi) that is lined with imposing polygonal stone walls. This leads to a doorway ornamented with half columns of Egyptian porphyry and decorated with carved zigzags, spirals and rosettes. The lintel is an enormous block of stone estimated to weigh more than 100 tonnes, but the structural stresses above it were displaced on to the mighty door jambs by a corbelled⁷ relieving triangle. The triangle was concealed by a facade of red and green bands of spirals and lozenges between two smaller carved pillars. Having crossed the threshold, you enter a circular chamber 14.3 m across and 13 m high, whose slightly pointed dome is built of beautifully dressed ashlar blocks that decrease in size up to a central keystone that locks the whole structure in place. Layers of clay were applied over the dome to waterproof it, and the whole edifice was covered with earth. The body itself was probably interred in the side-chamber, which opens off the main one.

Neither the body nor any treasure survives, although extrapolation from other sites suggests an inhumation accompanied by grave goods appropriate to sex and status: jewellery, mirrors, weapons, gold cups and so on. After the funeral, the tomb entrance was closed. Drinking cups (kylikes) are regularly found smashed on the floor of the dromoi, along with the bones of sacrificial animals, and of horses (sometimes in pairs) that may have pulled the chariot carrying the deceased to the tomb. The Treasury of Atreus was undoubtedly intended to be seen as the awe-inspiring architectural masterpiece that it is. It was presumably built during the lifetime of its occupant, and while it is likely that the dromoi of humbler chamber tombs were filled in after the burial, the grandiose entranceof this very labour-intensive project does not look like it was meant to be hidden.

There are also several cemeteries around Mycenae, which comprise groups of chamber tombs housing members of the ‘middle class’. The tombs are hewn from the natural rock, and contained relics of many generations, accompanied by good quality vases, clay figurines, and possibly objects of sentimental value, like one traveller’s(?) Egyptian seal. The silent masses are not buried in shaft graves, tholoi or chamber tombs, and their grave goods tend to be very mundane: personal things such as tools, spindle whorls, razors and terracotta models or figurines, many of which are female in one of three shapes named after the letter of the Greek alphabet that their poses resemble – phi, psi and tau (Φ, Ψ and Τ). Children were regularly buried with feeding bottles.

The Citadel and Settlement of Mycenae

The Mycenae citadel was a grandiose complex of buildings surrounded by some of the most impressive fortifications ever constructed. In making an approach to the ruler, you would pass through a propylon (entrance portico), a 7 m square canopied porch with a column on each side, which opened into a small open courtyard. Walking from there up the gradually sloping West Passage, you encountered the Great West Portal, in front of which was a balcony with stupendous views out across the Argive plain. From the Portal a passageway gave access to the Main Court, 11.5 × 15 m, covered in painted stucco to simulate large marble tiles.

The layout of the megaron (King’s Hall) accessed from the Main Court resembles that of a Classical-era temple. First you would enter a two-columned porch (aithousa), which housed two small altars and a libation bowl. Moving through huge wooden double doors mounted on bronze pivots, you would find yourself in a vestibule (prodomos) with a floor made of painted stucco, bordered with 1 m slabs of gypsum. Another impressive doorway finally led you into the domos, or Great Hall, an imposing space, 12.96 × 11.50 m, floored like the vestibule, and walled with frescoes depicting a battle involving horses, chariots, warriors and their womenfolk. Facing you was the central round hearth (3.7macross), decorated with flames and spirals painted round its sides. Four stuccoed wooden columns around the hearth supported an upper storey, and it is assumed that the throne itself was to your right. It is an appropriate setting for a mighty ruler.

The palace also had designated areas for religious worship, accommodation, workshops for craftsmen, and facilities for storing agricultural produce. The surrounding town covered some 32 ha, and the quality of the buildings suggests affluent owners. For instance, the House of the Oil Merchant contained seven storerooms filled with oil storage and transport jars, as well as nearly forty Linear B tablets; and the House of the Sphinxes contained thousands of pieces of ivory, including a plaque decorated with its eponymous sphinxes.

All the signals that the citadel of Mycenae broadcasts seem militaristic, yet it may have been fear, rather than aggression, that lurked behind these fortifications, since it was quite late in their history that the Mycenaeans started to build truly mighty fortresses. Pottery excavated in the foundations of the walls shows that the main fortifications of Mycenae began only around 1350-40 BCE, but then, around 1250 BCE, the citadel was nearly doubled in size as the walls were extended to enclose a series of religious buildings, along with Grave Circle A, which was also refurbished on a more monumental scale. The Great Ramp leading up to the citadel was added at this time, along with a new postern gate and a tower.

The great symbol of Mycenaean civilization, the Lion Gate, belongs to this phase. It is flanked on the left by the natural rock of the hill (with a facade of ‘conglomerate’⁸ blocks), and on the right by a rectangular bastion of massive conglomerate masonry, which constricts the passageway and exposes the unshielded side of any attacker to missile fire from above. The threshold, sides and lintel of the gate each weigh more than 20 tonnes, while the wall above uses corbelling to form a relieving triangle over the lintel. The triangular space is filled by a sculpted panel of grey limestone, carved in relief with two leonine creatures facing one another, with their front legs on two altars that flank a central Minoan-looking column with an architrave above it. Dowel-holes for attaching the animals’ heads suggest that they were gardant (facing outward). Animals placed like this are often regarded as apotropaic (to ward off evil), symbolizing protection, strength and stability. However, questions as to what inspired the subject-matter, where the Mycenaeans acquired the slab itself, what it actually looked like (painted? stone, wood, or metal heads?), what kind of animals (lions, as the second-century CE traveller Pausanias said? lionesses? griffins?), and what its meaning was, are fraught with controversy. None of the scholarly answers, however brilliantly argued, can be anything other than pure speculation.

The final phase of fortification, which began around 1200 BCE, extended the walls to protect access to a secret underground cistern, fed via an aqueduct from a nearby spring, and added sally-ports to allow authorized personnel to enter or exit the citadel discreetly. There are also ten or so ‘blockhouses’ in the Mycenae area, which could be signal stations, sometimes (fancifully) interpreted as the beacons of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.⁹

Who or what the Mycenaeans were afraid of is not entirely clear. Siege engines were not widely used, so any defensive purposes would have been adequately served by smaller walls. Part of their function must have been simply a display of invincibility. Mycenae’s walls, on average, are 7.5 m thick and more than 8 m high, although they are not as massive as those at nearby Tiryns, which were the first to be described as ‘cyclopean’. The myth related that Proitos, the founder of Tiryns, had his citadel built by the Cyclopes, who also built the citadel at Mycenae in the next generation,¹⁰ and later Greeks believed that suchmassive well-shaped blocks could only be the work of mythical monsters. In reality, the Mycenaeans constructed them of an inner and outer skin with a rubble filling, using hammers and a pendulum saw, which was one of the most technologically advanced devices of its day. The average cyclopean block could have been drawn on a sledge by fourteen oxen, before being rolled down from above or raised into position from below with the aid of earth ramps, but the Linear B tablets tell us nothing about the timescale, the labour force, or its working schedules.

Society, Economy and Religion

Mycenaean society was highly structured, based on a hierarchy of meticulous administrators who were at least as important as the aristocrats (although there may have been some overlap). What is odd, though, is the almost total anonymity of the kings. At the top was the wa-na-ka (wanax), the ‘king’, who sometimes presided over religious rituals; second in power and status was the ra-wa-ke-ta (lawagetas), ‘the leader of the people’; and each local area had its qa-si-re-u (basileus), ‘chieftain’. Priests and priestesses (i-je-ro-wo-ko) also had high status, as did the aristocratic e-qe-ta (hequetai), the ‘followers’ of the wanax (king). An extensive bureaucracy of scribes and officials ran the palace and local areas, and beneath them came the free citizens, who had their own organization and spokesmen, and owned land. At the bottom of the pile were the slaves (do-we-ro (male) or do-we-ra (female), giving us dowelos, which in Classical Greek was doulos = ‘slave’).

Mycenae’s epithet ‘Rich in Gold’ begs the question: where did it come from? Not from Mycenae: it came from Nubia, Egypt, Macedonia or the island of Thasos, and was probably paid for by a healthy agricultural economy that in turn sustained the activities of craftsmen, soldiers, sailors and rulers, who are characterized by an Odysseus-like resourcefulness.

Barley and wheat were the staple crops. Workers’ rations were distributed by the kotyle (= cup of 0.6 litres): three per day of barley; half as much of wheat (which has a higher nutritional value). Emmer wheat can be roasted and mixed with nuts to make portable snacks; barley is good in soups and stews, or as the basis for beer; and some slave women were given figs as well as grain. Forensic archaeological analysis of the interiors of their cooking vessels gives fascinating results: at Thebes they were eating pork, cereals, pulses and honey; at Midea the archaeologists who found cereal and oil on a ‘griddle tray’ wondered whether or not this was to prevent pancakes from sticking; and evidence from the House of the Sphinxes and the Granary at Mycenae suggested porridge made of bitter vetch (which requires pre-boiling to remove its toxicity), lentils, grass peas, wheat, barley and broad beans. Mycenaeans cooked using olive or safflower oil, used a wide variety of native herbs, and also ate almonds, pears, cherries, plums, wild strawberries, carob, walnuts, chestnuts and pistachios.

Olives and vines were particularly important: you can grow them on relatively poor ground despite limited rainfall; cereals can be cultivated between olive trees, allowing the maximization of manpower. All three crops are hoed, harvested and tended at different times of the year; and they are storable as oil, fruits or wine. Olive oil was exported, and provided an essential ingredient for the manufacture of perfumed oil and ointment. The Linear B tablets give us the other ingredients:

Axotas gave to Thyestes [tu-we-a] the perfume maker the following ingredients to make perfume: coriander [ko-ri-a2-da-na] seeds 576 litres; cypress [ku-pa-ro2] seeds 576 litres 157 16 units; fruit 240 litres; wine 576 litres; honey 58 litres; wool 6 kilograms; wine 58 litres.¹¹

References to flax workers also suggest the production of linseed oil and linen, and the textile industry was a key element in the economy of the Mycenaean kingdoms, with about 200 women recorded as making cloth at Pylos.

Substantial herds of oxen are implied by the Linear B tablets, and rather charmingly plough oxen were called things such as Dapple, Dusky, Noisy and Whitefoot. However, sheep and goats comprised the majority of the livestock (75 per cent of the animal bones from Mycenae are from sheep and goats, and a series of tablets from Knossos lists nearly 100,000 sheep), supplemented by small herds of pigs. These animals produced milk and cheese, wool and cloth, meat and leather.

Hunting and fishing were also part of the picture. Bronze fishhooks, lead weights and fish bones have all been found. Mycenaean aristocrats loved to hunt with hounds (kunagetai = ‘hunter’, literally ‘dog-leader’), and a fantastically lively fresco from Tiryns depicts hunters accompanied by spotted hounds, wearing red collars and surrounding a boar, which is being speared. Hare, duck, goose, partridge, fox, deer and even turtles were hunted for food and/or fur, while lions were hunted for sport. Horse bones are relatively infrequent, although the tablets do list horses in the context of military equipment, with white horses being particularly popular. Horse rearing may have been a major generator of wealth, especially in what Homer calls ‘horse-pasturing’ Argos.

Mycenaeans exploited sources of copper, silver and lead, and became key players in the Mediterranean metals trade. Lead was used as weights for fishing nets; to keep the hems of women’s clothing in place; and also used for mending pottery, showing that ceramics had quite a high value. Copper and bronze were used for jugs, braziers, cauldrons, frying pans, lamps, tweezers, pins, saws, drill bits, pruning knives, horses’ bits, octopus spears, scale pans and so on. The Linear B tablets from Pylos mention nearly 300 bronze smiths, so clearly this was a major facet of the economy.

The wreck of a merchant ship, Ulu Burun, which sank near Kas off the Turkish coast in c.1315 BCE revealed even more: 354 copper ingots (more than ten tonnes in weight), one tonne of tin ingots, terebinth resin found in Canaanite jars, turquoise and cobalt-blue glass ingots, and large quantities of Cypriot pottery. There were also some ebony logs, ostrich eggs, seals and a scarab from Egypt bearing the name of Nefertiti, elephant and hippopotamus ivory, faience and tin vessels, a gold cup and a gold and bronze Egyptian statuette. Various bronze tools, cylinder seals, oil lamps, wooden writing boards and fishing tackle probably belonged to the crew, and two Mycenaean swords, two seals, spearheads, and amber and glass beads suggest that two high-ranking Mycenaeans were aboard.

This extraordinary range of items from Egypt, the Aegean, Cyprus, Syro-Palestine, Mesopotamia and the Baltic points to a trade in both luxury goods and essential raw materials, in exchange for which the Mycenaeans offered olive oil, aromatic oils, ‘chariot kraters’ decorated with scenes of horses, chariots, bulls and other animals, textiles, slaves and possibly the services of mercenary soldiers. They capitalized on the fall of Knossos in c.1425 BCE, and by the thirteenthth century BCE they had gained control of the eastern trade routes, and forged well-developed political links with Egypt and the Levant: an inscription found in Kom el Hatan may document an official diplomatic mission by emissaries of the pharaoh Amenhotep III (1390–1352 BCE), which visited, among other places, Phaistos, Mycenae, Thebes or Kato Zakro, Nauplion, Kythera, Troy and Knossos. Faience plaques with the cartouche of the same pharaoh were found at Mycenae.

Trying to discover what the Mycenaeans believed in, who their gods were, and how they worshipped them is fraught with difficulty. We know that they held processions, gathered at shrines, performed rituals, danced, made offerings and sacrifices, and perhaps induced religious hysteria with alcohol and opium, but we have no religious texts, myths or hymns to give us access to the beliefs themselves, and archaeologists have not for certain identified any true Mycenaean temple.

One name for a goddess (or goddesses) that appears quite often is Potnia, although usually qualified by epithets that make it hard to tell whether we are dealing with different goddesses or different facets of the same goddess. On one tablet she is called a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja (Athana Potnia), ‘Mistress Athena’, which appears in Homer, but in later Greek the fertility goddesses Demeter and Persephone were called ‘the Potniai’, and it may be that the Mycenaean Potnia was an Earth Mother goddess. The tablet also gives us the names of three other familiar Greek deities: e-nu-wa-ri-jo is Enualios, an alternative name for Ares; pa-ja-wo resembles Paieon, an alternative name for Apollo; and po-se-da(o), Poseidon. Dionysos has also been tentatively identified, which would represent a serious challenge to the received wisdom that the Dionysos cult only began in Greece after the end of the Dark Age.

On the citadel of Mycenae is a Cult Centre, which is made up of several shrines on three levels. The Room with the Fresco is accessed via an ante-room, which contains a bath for ritual washing, an oval hearth, a bench-shaped altar with traces of ash, and a substantial altar painted with Minoan-style ‘horns of consecration’ and a socket that may have held a double axe. A fresco behind it shows a female worshipper/priestess/goddess with bunches of wheat and a griffin, while above them are two larger robed females facing each other (warrior goddesses?), one carrying a large sword and the other holding a spear/staff in salutation. Between them, two small male figures (worshippers?) appear to float in the air. Other rooms in the complex contained platforms, tables or altars (it is hard to tell these apart), bench altars, bowls, ‘idols’ and beads of glass paste, carnelian, amber, rock crystal and lapis lazuli. There was also a ‘processional way’. But this is all we know: the finds are the only clues as to what happened in the rooms.

The Linear B tablets, however, refer to ceremonies such as the Spreading of the Couch, which is a common spring fertility ritual throughout the Near East, and to di-pi-si-je-wi-jo, probably the Festival for the Dead (dipsioi = the ‘Thirsty Ones’, a euphemism for the dead), rather like the Classical Athenian All Souls Day, which concluded the Anthesteria festival, where the new wine was broached. The Spreading of the Couch was the second part of the Anthesteria, and the first part, theOpening of the Jars, may have an equivalent in the tablet entry, ‘new wine’: this major Classical Athenian festival may go back at least to 1200 BCE.

Gold, wool, perfumed oil, barley, figs, flour, wine, olive oil and honey were acceptable offerings to the Mycenaean divinities, and so were cows, pigs, goats, sheep and wild boar. A painted stone larnax  from Aghia Triada, dating from the period of Mycenaean rule in Crete, depicts men carrying two animals and what seems to be a model boat towards a standing figure in front of a small building with a ‘horned’ decoration on its roof and a tree beside it; women bring buckets; there are double axes with birds perching on them, and a basket of fruit or bread; musicians perform; two women ride in a horse-drawn chariot; others in elaborate headdresses are drawn in a chariot by winged griffins; a spotted ox is trussed up on an altar, with blood pouring out of its throat, while two goats await a similar fate. That much is clear, but the meaning and context is elusive.

The nature of the religious experience has been inferred from the ‘Great Goddess’ ring, which depicts a female (goddess? priestess?) seated under a tree, giving or receiving a bunch of poppy heads. Also present are two small females, a woman in a flounced skirt holding a bunch of lilies and other flowers, an upright double axe (which in Minoan Crete symbolized the Great Goddess), a weird figure-of-eight shield with a head, legs, arms and a sword, the Sun and Moon, and six animal heads. Quite what is going on in this possibly opium-fuelled scenario is utterly baffling.

More controversial still is a recent suggestion that human sacrifice may have occurred on occasion. A large tablet from Pylos, belonging to the last days before its destruction, could be listing offerings that included people:

At Pylos, he consecrates (or sacrifices) at Sphagianes and he brings gifts and leads the po-re-na (= sacrificial victims?): to Potnia one
Gold cup, one woman; …

To Iphimedeia one Gold dish, to Dia one Gold dish, one woman;

To Hermes Areias one Gold cup, one man …

To Zeus one Gold dish, one man; to Hera one Gold dish, one woman.¹²

The interpretation depends partly on reading the otherwise unknown word po-re-na as ‘sacrificial victims’, since the deities are offered a gold vessel and a man or woman (women to goddesses; men to gods). This could merely be a reference to offering slaves to the deity as servants, or indeed simply to figurines, but those who want to see something more bloodthirsty cite the use of ‘leads’ rather than ‘carries’ as evidence for a genuine human sacrifice, perpetrated in a last desperate attempt to ward off the destruction of Pylos.

War, Peace, Art, Food, Alcohol and Drugs

If the Mycenaeans have acquired a reputation as great warriors, it is partly on the basis of their military hardware. One of the most interesting finds is the ‘Dendra panoply’, the earliest surviving complete suit of metal armour from Europe. This comprises a full corselet whose hammered bronze breast and back plates were hinged together on one side and custom-made to fit the wearer – a fairly narrow-shouldered man about 1.68 m tall. Three-part shoulder pieces were fitted to the body; a high collar protected his neck; and a skirt of three overlapping bronze plates covered his lower body. The suit was leather-lined and held together with rawhide thongs. It affords a high level of protection and flexibility to a warrior wielding a sword or a thrusting spear, and vividly brings to life both the Linear B ideograms of body armour and Homer’s description of Hector as ‘covered with bronze all over’.

The armour was accompanied by a pair of greaves, a wrist protector, and a Homeric-looking boar’s tusk helmet with metal ear guards attached to a padded leather cap:

and on the outer side the white teeth

of a tusk-shining boar were close sewn one after another

with craftsmanship and skill.¹³

Although an oddity for Homer, this seems to have been the helmet of choice for the Mycenaean warrior elite: the boar’s tusk segments work like the ceramic plates in modern bullet-proof vests, but an adult wild boar is an exceedingly dangerous animal, and you need around fifty pairs of tusks to make one helmet. Hunting a helmet’s-worth of boars indicates considerable martial prowess. The defensive armoury was completed by either a big rectangular ‘tower shield’ of raw ox hide stitched on to a wicker framework, so-called after the one that Aias wields in the Iliad,¹⁴which is as big as a wall, or a large ‘figure of eight’ type. So when Homer’s Agamemnon wields two spears and a round shield, he is using (anachronistically) gear from the eighth century BCE.

When on the offensive, a Mycenaean fighter might use a 70 cm or more long rapier-like sword for cut-and-thrust fighting, until, in the second half of the fourteenth century BCE, a shorter blade with a double cutting edge used for slashing was introduced. Short daggers, sometimes superbly ornamented, were also used. Bronze-pointed heavy thrusting spears were essential items, too, and there is ample evidence for the use of the bow, with arrows tipped with flint, obsidian and bronze. Hundreds of two-horse chariots, whose cars had four-spoked wheels and a hide-covered wicker-framed body, are itemized on the Linear B tablets, along with the availability of spare parts. This is somewhat surprising, given that they are very unsuited to the Greek terrain: they were possibly deployed more as prestige transport for kings or nobles than as shock-troops on the battlefield. All this weaponry was extremely costly, so only a small number of warriors could have been heavily armed. Nevertheless, Mycenaean warriors may have hiredthemselves out as mercenaries to foreign powers such as Egypt.

Naval forces were also deployed: at Pylos more than 600 rowers are listed on a group of tablets, which may record preparations for a naval operation big enough to man between 12 and 20 ships, although nowhere near the 90 that Nestor of Pylos led to Troy in Homer.

One glib comparison often made between the Minoans and the Mycenaeans is that the Minoans were a group of artistically gifted peaceniks, whereas the Mycenaeans were a bunch of warmongering philistines. This is simply not true. It is clear, for instance, that there was plenty of music to provide a soundtrack to Mycenaean life, played on seven-stringed lyres, or on the more professional four-or seven-stringed phorminx, which may have been the instrument of choice of bards to accompany their songs. The main wind instrument was the aulos, made from two tubes of cane, metal, wood, ivory or bone, each with either a single saxophone-type reed or a double reed like an oboe. For percussion, a sistrum gave tambourine-style effects.

There was a large-scale Mycenaean textile industry manufacturing clothing from sheep and goat wool, linen, and also some silk. Fabrics, which were treated with oil to give them a slight lustre, were patterned and colourful, with dyes being extracted from animal, vegetable and mineral sources: saffron or onion skins create yellow; indigo makes blue; the murex shellfish gives purple, etc. The basic form of Mycenaean dress was a long tunic, belted at the waist, sometimes covered by a knitted shawl, but the most elaborate female outfit worked a look which channelled Minoan fashions. Coming on trend in c.1550 BCE, it comprised an underskirt that doesn’t always show, a tiered wraparound skirt tied with a cord belt at the waist, and a tight short-sleeved bodice or bolero made of several pieces of material, decorated with intricately woven braid, and fastened under the bosom. It was drawn back to expose the breasts, but sewn together below to give a bit of uplift. Necklaces, bracelets, earrings, hairpins and ankle bracelets completed the ensemble. Males sometimes wore simple short-sleeved tunics, or pleated kilts, often with chequered braid on the fringe round the hem, and with a linen loincloth as underwear. Men of status are sometimes depicted wearing a long patterned or flounced ankle-lengthtunic. People might go barefoot, or wear leather boots.

Hairstyle seems to have been influenced by age, occupation and/or social status, as well as personal taste. Young boys and girls are depicted shaven-headed, with a ponytail and a characteristic lock of hair above the forehead. Around puberty, their hair might be allowed to grow short and curly with the forelock and ponytail, or be kept partly shaven with several uncut locks. On reaching puberty they were allowed to have a single lock, and grow their hair. Homer described the Greeks at Troy as long-haired, but mature Mycenaean males exhibit a variety of hair lengths, and appear both clean-shaven or with beards and optional moustaches.

All human life is present on the frescoes that adorned the walls of Mycenaean buildings: processional scenes; ‘trophy paintings’ to impress visitors or to symbolize victory in battle; pictures of bull leaping; horses and grooms with chariots; friezes of dogs and stag hunting; riddling sphinxes; and enigmatic cult scenes. However, the Mycenaeans seem to have been less interested in large-scale sculpture (the stelai from the Grave Circles, and the Lion Gate being notable exceptions), and there is relatively little sculpture in the round (although a stuccoed and painted female head, which has a strange rosette motif on the chin and each cheek is quite striking). Some fairly good-quality ivory work appears on the handles of weapons and mirrors, combs and cylindrical boxes, and as inlays on furniture, and there is also an exquisitely carved group depicting two women and a small child. On an even smaller scale, beads and seal-stones were made from gold, rock crystal, carnelian, agate, sardonyx, steatite and amethyst, or imported amber and lapis lazuli. Faience production techniques (firing a coloured glaze on to the surface of an unvitrified soft core) were probably picked up from Egypt, and true glass (often described ‘glass paste’) was moulded by Mycenaean artisans into beads and inlays.

Mycenaean ceramic ware was wheel-made and became so standardized that changes in fashion are easily discerned by the expert eye, allowing the establishment of an accurately dated sequence of developing shapes and motifs. There were kraters (mixing bowls) for preparing wine, jugs for pouring it, and extremely elegant cups with shallow delicate-handled bowls on top of high slender stems for drinking it. Storage containers ranged from pithoi, often more than 1.5 m high, to narrow-necked amphorae or ‘stirrup-jars’ – closed vases with a false mouth, and a separate spout beside it for pouring. This pottery was ‘painted’ with an iron-rich clay slip that turned into a glossy red or black during the firing. The decoration tended to be built up in parallel horizontal zones, and recurrent motifs, many of which show Minoan influence, including double axes, leaves, spirals, stylized flowers and shells, and vertical lines and zigzags. By c.1450 BCE the distinctly Mycenaean ‘Palace Style’ appeared, which recycled motifs from the Cretan Floral and Marine styles, but became so stylized that by the thirteenth century BCE the origin of the motifs was often unrecognizable. The ‘octopus test’ to distinguish between the vibrant octopi of the Marine Style and their practically abstract Palace Style counterparts is a good, if crude, way of identifying these styles. Pictorial decoration was not common and the most famous example is the Warrior Vase from the citadel at Mycenae, showing eleven almost Disneyesque warriors marching off to war.

The Mycenaeans were not averse to getting intoxicated, and the importation of resinated wine in Canaanite jars suggests a penchant for exotic Eastern flavours. Wine with herbs such as laurel, lavender and sage was popular, and a tripod cooking pot from Chania contained resinated wine with rue, a narcotic and stimulant: heady stuff indeed. Very weird to modern taste is a mixed fermented beverage made of wine, barley beer and honey mead that may have been regularly used in cult practice, and one of the oddest occurrences of this mixture is from a vessel probably used for feeding babies.

 The terebinth resin that was sometimes added to wine might also have been used in medicines. Certainly plants like Cretan dittany, coriander, saffron, cumin, figs and myrtle were all used medicinally, and a Linear B tablet from Pylos that includes the word pa-ma-ko (Greek, pharmaka = ‘drugs’) has a reference to e-pi-ka, (Greek, ibiskos = ‘tree mallow’/‘hibiscus’), whose root is commonly used as a remedy for gastrointestinal disturbances and oral inflammations. Pins with bronze stems and crystal heads in the shape of poppy capsules have been found in both Grave Circles at Mycenae, and the production of opium latex by incising unripe poppy heads was definitely known around 1300 BCE. Raw opium is a powerful narcotic, analgesic and sedative, and may have been applied directly to wounds, or pieces of wool soaked in a solution of opium and saffron could have been used as suppositories to alleviate internal pain.

Rise and Fall

As Mycenaeans’ power was moving on an upward trajectory, they were presented with an opportunity to take over the central position that Crete had enjoyed for so long, and they grabbed it. The majority of the Minoan Palaces were suddenly destroyed, along with Cretan naval supremacy, around 1425 BCE. The reason for this is unclear, although the Mycenaeans often get the blame. Yet the destruction on Crete appears to be much more comprehensive than would be needed to facilitate a political takeover: earthquake, insurrection, civil war, socio-economic collapse or some combination of these seems more likely.¹⁵

Although the Mycenaeans did not possess an ‘Empire’ in any meaningful sense, they did ultimately dominate the entire southern Aegean: from here on, Mycenaean pottery, not Minoan, is found in Egypt, Syria and Cyprus, and from c.1400 BCE onwards theirfifty-oared ships were ferrying settlers to Crete, Rhodes and the Aegean coast of Anatolia. However, despite the Mycenaean presence on Crete, indigenous religious traditions there seem to have carried on much as they had before, and indeed a bull-leaping fresco at Mycenae, probably dating from a time when there were Minoan frescoes still available to copy on Crete, shows that the cultural influence was not entirely one-way.

The Palace of Minos at Knossos remained in use for at least two or three generations, and maybe for a lot longer, until it was again destroyed by fire in c.1370 BCE, c.1190 BCE or even later. There has been scholarly dispute about this, with a ferocity inversely proportional to its conclusiveness, for more than seventy-five years. One current focus of the debate concerns whether Knossos remained the principal centre of the island after c.1370, or whether Chania (ancient Kydonia) in western Crete took over. The Post-Palatial period, c.1370/?1190–c.1000 BCE, takes us to the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the transition to the Classical period. Throughout the Aegean many sites were abandoned or destroyed in the LM III B pottery phase (c.1190), with the Linear B documents recording the very last year of the economic administration. There were troubles on the mainland at this time, but what form they took in Crete is uncertain, although refugees from the mainland are a likely factor.

A highly distinctive painting from this era is ‘La Parisienne’, an elegant Minoan/Mycenaean lady with large eyes, curly hair, red lips and a retroussé nose, who has a knot binding her hair at the nape of her neck, which many scholars regard as ‘sacred’, possibly an apotropaic device and/or a symbol of a Minoan goddess. Her less elite counterparts who ‘inhabited’ the cemetery at Armenoi on Crete in the LM III period give us an indication of how precarious her life might have been: 34 per cent of the children died before reaching the age of 2, and 57 per cent before they were age 5; she could expect to live to about 28 years old, with 20–25 being the most dangerous (childbearing) time. Average female height was around 1.55 m, and dental health was very problematic, involving cavities (which indicate a diet rich in carbohydrates), disruption in the formation of the enamel caused by nutritional deficiencies or infectious disease, gum infections and plaque, although a woman in Tomb 132 did practise dental hygiene to eradicate the latter. Such women also had a range of diseases to contend with, including osteomyelitis (inflamation of the bone marrow), brucellosis (transmitted to humans through bacteria in goats’ milk), TB (contracted through infected cows’ milk), osteoporosis, scurvy, rickets and anaemia caused by iron deficiency. Cancer was a potential risk, too. However, they probably led an active lifestyle and had a good knowledge of orthopaedic techniques, so were able to take care of injuries such as bone fractures.  

The woman in Tomb 132’s male counterpart could expect to live three years longer on average. There is no indication of her actual partner’s cause of death, but he was aged between 35 and 50, stood 1.68mtall, and suffered from osteoarthritis in a way that suggests he put continual stress on his back and neck. His teeth were a real mess, too: he had lost twenty-three of them, and the nine that were left were absolutely riddled with cavities and showed extreme variations in their patterns of wear, indicating that he might have been using them as tools, very possibly during a lifetime spent as a weaver.

Henry Miller pertinently wrote that Mycenae ‘wears an impenetrable air: it is grim, lovely, seductive and repellent. What happened here is beyond all conjecture.’¹⁶ And so it is. Quite how and why the Mycenaean civilization disintegrated in the twelfth centuryBCE is still a mystery. The enormous efforts devoted to Mycenae’s walls in the thirteenth century BCE were replicated at Tiryns and Athens, and Linear B tablets from the Pylos refer to 800 men being sent to the coast, perhaps to guard against seaborne aggressors. Yet much of this was to no avail. By about 1200 BCE the key political and economic centres, such as Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes, Orkhomenos and Gla (although probably not Athens), had suffered destruction by fire and the sea-routes were disrupted. Archaeological chronology can have a tendency to make things look more sudden than they were: ‘only fifty years’ is a long time to people who routinely died aged twenty-eight, and many of the changes were gradual and cumulative. Nevertheless, many sites never recovered even a glimmer of their former significance, and there is nothing to show who or what was responsible.

One of the most commonly regurgitated theories is that of the Dorian Invasion. Yet although Greek myth talks of ‘the Return of the Heraklids’, in which the Dorians and the descendants of Herakles made themselves masters of the Peloponnese eighty years after the Trojan War, the ancient historical sources give no impression of any single migration of large numbers of people, and the very concept of the ‘return’ of the Heraklids implies that they were not alien intruders. Furthermore, the argument that the Doric dialect was introduced to Greece by incomers after the fall of the palaces is currently countered in terms of the East Greek dialects (Attic-Ionic, Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot) being related to that of the Palace rulers, with Doric and North West Greek being the dialect of the lower classes. An invasion significant enough to overwhelm the Mycenaeans would also have left clear-cut archaeological evidence from a very specific date and with a geographically traceable itinerary. None of this exists. In fact, the archaeology shows that Mycenaeans continued to live in the ruins of their palaces, and the whole concept of a ‘Dorian Invasion’ is now widely regarded as untenable.

So was it an ‘archaeologically invisible’ enemy, who only left evidence of destruction? There was a dramatic depopulation at the end of the Mycenaean period, which might suggest a diaspora rather than an influx of newcomers. The ‘Sea Peoples’ – seaborne warriors of very vague identity – caused havoc in the eastern Mediterranean in the late thirteenth and early twelfth centuries BCE, until Ramses III of Egypt crushed them in 1191 BCE. Pylos had worries about a threat from the sea, even though Pylos itself is a good way from the eastern Mediterranean and there is no evidence to implicate the Sea Peoples in sacking it. The Mycenaeans, however, do not seem to have felt the same unease.

Might the troubles have been internal? Greek mythology is replete with tales of domestic turmoil, notably the murder of Agamemnon at Mycenae, and the near takeover of Odysseus’ realm by Penelope’s suitors. But myth is not history, and again the archaeology is silent or inconclusive. It would undoubtedly be easier for, say, an oppressed substratum of society to bring down a fortress such as Mycenae or Tiryns from within rather than from without, and this would leave fewer traces, but the theory is as speculative as it is attractive, and the destructions may have resulted from different causes in different places.

Climate change is a modern preoccupation that is sometimes brought into the discussion, but pollen evidence shows no sign of extreme climatic changes, and the tablets of Pylos present a picture of prosperous arable and pastoral activity. Another environmental theory blames overexploitation of land by the palace bureaucracies, thus leaving the kingdoms trying to support a much bigger population than the land could sustain, and hence very vulnerable to even a short period of drought. But the Linear B tablets show sign of neither drought nor famine.

There is evidence for a mighty earthquake at the end of the thirteenth century, but the ‘apocalypse’ theory of an enormous seismic event taking out Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos all at the same instant is unconvincing: Pylos is really too far from Mycenae for them both to have been destroyed like this, and, when the Minoans on Crete suffered similar tragedies, they bounced back, built more luxurious palaces, and went from strength to strength. A variant seismic theory goes for an ‘earthquake storm’, such as has affected Turkey in recent decades, with one earthquake triggering another along the tectonic lines and destroying the palaces piecemeal; other speculation focuses on water, since seismic movements can frequently block-up springs, which to a citadel such as Mycenae would have been as catastrophic as the demolition of its walls. These are all interesting, but unproven. The temptation to look for the single ‘smoking gun’ is always great, but the reality is probably far less dramatic: Mycenaean civilization went out with a whimper, not a bang.

Around 1100 BCE, this great Bronze Age people finally merged into what is conventionally called the Dark Age. Yet it was not entirely gloomy: the Greeks progressed from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age; and though the art of writing, now redundant with the demise of the bureaucracy, disappeared from the Greek world, and without writing there is no history, there was still poetry. The Irish have a saying that a writer is a failed talker, and within that illiterate context emerged the finest poetic works that Greece produced: the poems of Homer.

Notes – Chapter 2

1. AP IX.101, trans. E. Morgan, in P. Jay (ed.) The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Epigrams, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

2. Graves I–V were excavated by Schliemann; VI by P. Stamatakes.

3. Telegram dated 28 November 1876 to King George of Greece: H. Schliemann, Mycenae: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Bell & Howell Co, 1880, 380–1. See also D.A. Traill,Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit, Penguin: London, 1995, 162; S.P.M. Harrington, W.M. Calder III, D.A. Traill, K. Demakopoulou, and K.D.S. Lapatin. ‘Behind the Mask of Agamemnon’, Archaeology (July/August 1999), 52.

4. Schliemann telegram to a Greek newspaper: Tr. W.M. Calder III and D.A. Traill, eds., Myth, Scandal, and History: The Heinrich Schliemann Controversy and a First Edition of the Mycenaean Diary, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986, 234.

5. Homer, Iliad 11.632 ff., trans. R. Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

6. Despite its evocative name, it is not a treasury and had nothing to do with the mythical Atreus.

7. Corbelling is a technique in which each course of blocks slightly overlaps the one below in order to reduce the span still to be roofed.

8. A stone consisting of naturally cemented together pebbles, cobblestones and other sediments.

9. See below, p. 168 f.

10. Pausanias 2.16.4. He was immensely impressed with the walls, which he regarded as no less marvellous than the Egyptian pyramids (9.36.3).

11. Trans. R. Castleden, The Mycenaeans, London: Routledge, 2005, 108.

12. Tn 316.

13. Homer, Iliad 10.263 ff.

14. Ibid., 7.219–23, although Aias’ shield also incorporates a boss, which tower shields did not have.

15. See above, pp. 14–16.

16. Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, New York: New Directions, 1941, 86.