Walls made for giants
Look closely at a Cyclopean wall and you see a puzzle of enormous stones. Unlike the neat rectangular blocks of a classical temple, they were split from the rock, trimmed just enough to sit against their neighbours, and stacked in uneven courses. The gaps between them were filled with smaller stones, pushed in to lock the big ones in place. There is no mortar at all: the walls stand because of their own weight and the friction between the stones.
Most Cyclopean walls have two faces of large blocks with earth and rubble filling the space between them, which made it possible to build walls of extraordinary thickness. At Tiryns, according to UNESCO, the walls completed at the end of the thirteenth century BCE are up to 8 metres thick and 13 metres high, run for about 750 metres around the citadel, and use even bigger stones than those of Mycenae.
Who were the Cyclopes?
In Greek myth the Cyclopes were giants with a single eye in the middle of the forehead. Some, like Polyphemus in the Odyssey, were savage shepherds; others were master craftsmen who forged Zeus’s thunderbolts. According to a story recorded by the geographer Strabo, seven Cyclopes came from Lycia, in Asia Minor, to build the walls of Tiryns for its legendary king Proetus.
In the second century CE the travel writer Pausanias saw the walls of Tiryns and described them as “a work of the Cyclopes made of unwrought stones, each stone being so big that a pair of mules could not move the smallest from its place to the slightest degree”, with small stones inserted between them to bind the large ones together. At Mycenae he was told that the walls and the Lion Gate were also the Cyclopes’ work. He even complained that Greek historians described the Egyptian pyramids in minute detail but never mentioned the walls of Tiryns, which were “no less marvellous”.
So who really built them?
Mycenaean builders, with simple tools and a great deal of labour. The walls belong to the last great phase of Mycenaean citadels, in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, when the rulers of Mycenae, Tiryns and other centres enlarged and strengthened their fortifications. The stone was mostly local limestone, so the hardest part was lifting and placing each block.
Why use stones so big? Partly for defence, since a thick dry-stone wall is hard to breach. Partly for show: the size of the blocks advertised how much labour a ruler could command. In some places, such as the Lion Gate at Mycenae, the builders switched to blocks of conglomerate cut into neat rectangles for the most visible parts, which shows that the rough style was a choice.
Galleries inside the walls
At Tiryns the builders also used the thickness of the walls. On the east and south sides they left long passages inside them, roofed by stepping the stones inwards until the two sides met in a point. Off these galleries open small rooms, probably used as storerooms. Walking through them today, with the light coming in from the ends, is the best way to feel the mass of a Cyclopean wall.
Other Cyclopean walls
The technique was used across Mycenaean Greece. At Gla, in Boeotia, a vast fortress of the thirteenth century BCE was built on a rock rising from Lake Kopais, which the Mycenaeans drained to create farmland. On the Acropolis of Athens, a stretch of the Mycenaean wall can still be seen near the Propylaia, under the later classical buildings. The word “Cyclopean” is now used by archaeologists for any wall of huge irregular stones without mortar, wherever and whenever it was built.
Where to see it
Tiryns, near Nafplio, has the most impressive Cyclopean walls and the galleries; Mycenae, about 20 km away, has the walls around the Lion Gate and the citadel. The two form a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1999). Gla is in Boeotia, north-west of Thebes. Check opening times with the Greek Ministry of Culture.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns” (941).
- Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.16.5, 2.25.8 and 9.36.5, transl. W. H. S. Jones (Perseus Digital Library).
- Strabo, Geography, 8.6.11.
- G. Mylonas, Mycenae and the Mycenaean Age (1966).
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “Mycenaean Civilization”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003).
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