Mycenae's walls were so huge later Greeks credited them to giants
Some blocks in Mycenae's gates weigh over 20 tonnes, and a few may approach 100. Later Greeks decided only the one-eyed Cyclopes could have lifted them. From this hilltop in the Peloponnese, a Bronze Age power once reached across southern Greece, Crete and the Aegean islands, lending its name to a whole era.
The citadel sits on a hill 274 metres high in the north-east corner of the Argive plain, about 120 kilometres south-west of Athens. The spot overlooked the whole plain, controlled the easy routes toward the Isthmus of Corinth, and had farmland and water. People lived there from around 5000 BC, but its moment came in the second millennium BC. Historians call the stretch from about 1600 BC to 1100 BC the Mycenaean period, and around 1350 BC the citadel and lower town held some 30,000 people across 32 hectares. The name itself is probably pre-Greek, though Pausanias linked it to a mushroom or sword cap belonging to the hero Perseus.
Its royal graves tell the story of rising wealth. Grave Circle B, the older group, dates from roughly 1650 BC; Grave Circle A, excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876, held six shaft graves with 19 bodies and far richer goods, including inlaid swords, the Silver Siege Rhyton and the gold mask popularly called the Mask of Agamemnon. Later rulers switched to beehive-shaped tholos tombs, the largest being the so-called Treasury of Atreus. Being so visible, every tholos was eventually robbed.
The famous Cyclopean walls went up around 1350 BC and enclosed a palace with a megaron, a throne room built around a central hearth under four columns. Around 1250 BC the wall was pushed out to take in Grave Circle A, and the Lion Gate was built, using a relieving triangle to spread the load. A final extension around 1200 BC added a secret passage of some 99 steps down to a rock-cut cistern 15 metres underground, fed by a tunnel from a distant spring. Egyptian inscriptions already named the city alongside Thebes and Knossos, and a scarab of Queen Tiye was found in its temple.
The Minoan dominance of the Aegean ended around 1450 BC, and Mycenaean expansion ran largely unchecked until a wave of upheaval in the twelfth century BC destroyed the city around 1150 BC. The Venetian engineer Francesco Vandeyk correctly identified the ruins in 1700, using Pausanias's account of the Lion Gate, and in 1999 UNESCO listed Mycenae with nearby Tiryns as a World Heritage Site. Linear B tablets from both preserve the earliest written Greek.
Source: Mycenae
