A new entrance for a bigger citadel
In the mid-thirteenth century BCE the rulers of Mycenae enlarged a citadel that was already old. The new stretch of wall on the north-west side swung out to take in Grave Circle A, the ring of royal shaft graves dug some three centuries earlier, and the gate was built into this new wall. Anyone entering the citadel now passed the graves of the ancestors before climbing towards the palace. The choice of where to put the door was already a political message.
How was it built?
The gate is a simple structure made of a few huge stones. Two upright monoliths form the sides. Across them lies the lintel, a single block 4.5 metres long, 2 metres deep and 0.8 metres thick: about 7 cubic metres of stone, which works out at roughly 18 to 20 tonnes. The opening below is 3.10 metres wide at the threshold and 2.95 metres high, narrowing slightly towards the top.
A lintel can crack if too much wall presses on its centre. So above it the builders laid the courses of the wall in steps, each projecting a little further inwards, to leave a triangular gap: the relieving triangle. The weight of the wall runs down the sloping sides of the triangle onto the jambs, and the lintel carries little more than itself. The gap was then closed with a relatively thin slab of limestone, carved in relief, which decorates the opening without supporting anything. Mycenaean builders used the same trick over the doors of their great domed tombs.
Lionesses without heads
The relief shows two large felines, usually identified as lionesses, standing face to face. Their front paws rest on two altar-like bases, and between them rises a column that widens towards the top, of the type seen in Minoan architecture, topped by a capital and the ends of roof beams. The heads were made separately and attached; they have been lost, so we do not know if the animals faced each other or turned to look at whoever was arriving.
What did it mean? Animals guarding a central pillar, a tree or a goddess are common on Minoan seals and rings, where the central element often stands for a deity or a shrine. Here the column may stand for the palace, for a god, or for the royal house itself, protected by the strongest animals people knew. No inscription explains it. As the only large Mycenaean sculpture that has survived, it is also the closest thing we have to an emblem of the kings who lived behind it.
A doorway that was also a trap
The approach did as much work as the relief. Visitors climbed a ramp into a narrow court, with the citadel wall on the left and, on the right, a massive projecting bastion, part of the same circuit of Cyclopean walls. Defenders on the bastion looked down on anyone in the court. A common reading is that an attacker holding a shield in his left hand would have had his unprotected right side towards the bastion. In peacetime, the same space slowed visitors down and made them look up at the lions before they were allowed in.
Seen for more than three thousand years
Unlike most Mycenaean buildings, the gate never disappeared. When Pausanias visited Mycenae in the second century CE, he saw “parts of the city wall, including the gate, upon which stand lions”, and was told that these, too, were the work of the Cyclopes, the giants who had built the walls of Tiryns. Thanks to his description, the Venetian administrator Francesco Grimani recognised the ruins of Mycenae in 1700. The Greek Archaeological Society cleared the gate of earth in 1840, and in 1876 Heinrich Schliemann began digging just inside it, where he found the gold of Grave Circle A.
Where to see it
The Lion Gate is the entrance to the archaeological site of Mycenae, in the Argolid, about two hours by road from Athens; it is still the way into the citadel. The site, which UNESCO listed with Tiryns in 1999, includes Grave Circle A just behind the gate, the palace at the top, the Treasury of Atreus nearby and a museum. Check opening times with the Greek Ministry of Culture.
Sources
- G. Mylonas, Mycenae and the Mycenaean Age (1966).
- Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.16.5, transl. W. H. S. Jones (Perseus Digital Library).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns” (941).
- N. C. Loader, Building in Cyclopean Masonry (1998).
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “Mycenaean Civilization”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003).
