A name borrowed from a myth
Nobody in the Bronze Age called themselves “Mycenaean”. The name is modern, taken from Mycenae, the citadel in the north-eastern Peloponnese that Homer called “rich in gold” and made the home of Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks at Troy. It covers a whole culture spread across mainland Greece, with strongholds at Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes and Athens, and, by the fifteenth century BCE, at Knossos on Crete as well.
The modern story begins with Heinrich Schliemann, the German businessman who had already dug at Troy. In 1876, inside the walls of Mycenae, he opened a circle of royal shaft graves, now called Grave Circle A, and found gold masks, cups, jewellery and weapons. He was convinced he had found Agamemnon. He was wrong by about three centuries: the graves date to around 1550 BCE, long before any likely date for a Trojan War. The famous line “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon” is itself a later embellishment; according to William Parkinson of the Field Museum in Chicago, what Schliemann actually wrote was more cautious, and it referred to a different mask.
Warriors, traders and their gold
The shaft graves show an elite that liked to be buried armed and covered in gold. That taste is visible again in 2015, when Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker of the University of Cincinnati found an untouched tomb near the palace of Pylos, dated to around 1450 BCE. The man in it, now called the Griffin Warrior after an ivory plaque decorated with a griffin, lay with weapons, gold rings and more than 3,500 objects in all. Among them was a sealstone of agate only a few centimetres wide, carved with a warrior killing two enemies in such fine detail that some figures can only be properly seen with a magnifying glass. It was made in Minoan style, a reminder of how much the mainland learned from Crete.
According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mycenaean pottery and the oil and wine it carried travelled from Spain to the Levant. At home, the Mycenaeans built roads, bridges, drainage works and citadels wrapped in walls of enormous stones.
Greek on clay
What makes the Mycenaeans special is that we can read them. Palace scribes kept accounts on clay tablets in Linear B, a script adapted from the Minoan Linear A, and in 1952 Michael Ventris showed that the language was Greek, written some five centuries before Homer. The tablets are lists, and lists say a lot. They name a king, the wanax, at the top of each palace, and officials, craftsmen, shepherds and slaves below. They count sheep, perfumed oil, bronze, chariot wheels and offerings to the gods. Many of those gods are familiar: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, Athena, Artemis and even Dionysus, whose name appears on tablets from Pylos centuries before the classical cult.
Where did they come from?
A study of ancient DNA published in Nature in 2017, led by Iosif Lazaridis, compared Minoans from Crete with Mycenaeans from the mainland. Both descended for at least three quarters from the first farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean. The Mycenaeans had an extra component linked to populations of the Eurasian steppe or Armenia, which fits the arrival of Indo-European speakers, the ancestors of the Greek language, at some point before. The study also found that modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, with some later additions.
A world that burned
From the end of the thirteenth century BCE, the palaces were destroyed one after another. The palace of Pylos burned around 1180 BCE. The fire baked the unfired clay tablets in its archive, preserving the records of its last months; the American archaeologist Carl Blegen found the first of them on the very first day of his excavation, in 1939. Mycenae and Tiryns were damaged too. The causes are still debated (earthquakes, revolts, raids, drought, the breakdown of trade across the eastern Mediterranean) and were probably several at once.
Writing disappeared from Greece for about four centuries. People went on living and speaking Greek, but the palaces, the scribes and the great walls were left behind. When Homer’s poems took shape, in the eighth century BCE, the ruins of Mycenae and Tiryns were still standing, and the Greeks filled them with heroes. Walk through the Lion Gate today and you are entering the stage they imagined.
Where to see it
Mycenae and Tiryns, in the Argolid, are a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1999), and Mycenae has its own archaeological museum. The Palace of Nestor at Pylos, in Messenia, is protected by a modern roof; the finds from the Griffin Warrior tomb are often lent to exhibitions, so check where they are on show. The gold of the shaft graves, including the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Check opening times with the Greek Ministry of Culture.
Sources
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “Mycenaean Civilization”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns” (941).
- I. Lazaridis et al., “Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans”, Nature 548 (2017).
- University of Cincinnati, Pylos excavations: the Griffin Warrior tomb (J. Davis and S. Stocker).
- C. W. Blegen and M. Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia (1966-1973).
- Field Museum, Chicago, exhibition “The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great” (2015-2016), press materials.
