Citadels: power on a hill
A Mycenaean ruler lived on a hill, behind walls. Mycenae occupies a rocky spur between two mountains, above the plain of Argos; Tiryns a low limestone ridge near the sea. The builders followed the slopes with terraces, ramps and stairs, so the palace stood at the top and everyone else lived lower down, inside or outside the walls. UNESCO describes the two sites as the greatest cities of the Mycenaean world.
The walls are the first thing you notice. They are built of huge, roughly shaped limestone blocks with smaller stones packed into the gaps and no mortar, a technique later Greeks called Cyclopean because they thought only giants could have lifted such stones. At Tiryns, completed at the end of the thirteenth century BCE, the walls run for about 750 metres around the citadel and are up to 8 metres thick and 13 metres high. Inside their thickness the builders left long galleries roofed with stepped stones, probably used as storerooms or protected passages.
Gates that make you slow down
Mycenaean gates were designed for control. At Mycenae the main entrance, the Lion Gate (about 1250 BCE), is reached up a ramp between the citadel wall and a projecting tower, so anyone approaching walked through a narrow space overlooked by defenders. The opening is only 3.10 metres wide and 2.95 metres high at the threshold, under a lintel block 4.5 metres long. Above it, the builders left a triangular gap to take the weight off the lintel, and filled it with a carved slab: two lionesses facing a column. At Tiryns the entrance ramp was even longer and passed between two lines of wall before reaching the gate.
The megaron: a throne room around a fire
At the top of the citadel stood the palace, and at the heart of the palace the megaron, a long hall entered through a porch with two columns and a vestibule. The best preserved is at Pylos, in western Greece, the Palace of Nestor excavated by Carl Blegen from 1939. Its throne room measures about 13 by 11 metres. In the middle lay a round hearth 4 metres across, its rim painted with flames, black on white. Four wooden columns, each carved with 32 flutes, held up the roof around an opening that let out the smoke and let in light. The throne stood against the right-hand wall, and painted lions and griffins guarded it.
Pylos was barely fortified, unlike Mycenae and Tiryns, which shows that not every palace felt equally threatened. All of them, though, had storerooms for oil and wine, workshops and archives of clay tablets around the megaron.
Tholos tombs: domes for the dead
The most daring Mycenaean buildings were for the dead. A tholos (Greek for a round building) is a tomb made of a circular chamber dug into a hillside and roofed with a stone dome, reached by a long open corridor, the dromos. The dome is built by corbelling: each course of stone projects slightly inward over the one below until the opening is small enough to close with one stone, with no wedge-shaped stones as in a true arch. Seen from inside it looks like a giant beehive.
The finest is the so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, built around 1350-1250 BCE. Its corridor is 36 metres long; its chamber is 14.5 metres across and 13.5 metres high, and the lintel over the door is a single block estimated at about 120 tonnes. The name comes from the travel writer Pausanias, who in the second century CE saw at Mycenae “underground chambers of Atreus and his children, in which were stored their treasures”. The tomb had been robbed long before; its occupant is unknown.
What later Greeks kept
When the palaces fell, around 1200 BCE, the walls and tombs remained, and later Greeks built legends around them. Some ideas also survived in building. UNESCO lists the Mycenaean influence on classical Greek architecture among the reasons Mycenae and Tiryns are World Heritage, and the most often cited link is the megaron itself: a long room with a porch of two columns on the short side is the basic plan of the Greek temple, where a god’s statue replaced the king’s throne and the hearth.
Where to see it
Mycenae and Tiryns, in the Argolid, form a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1999); at Mycenae you can see the Lion Gate, the citadel, the Treasury of Atreus and the site museum in one visit. Tiryns is near Nafplio. The Palace of Nestor at Pylos, in Messenia, is covered by a modern roof with walkways around the throne room. Check opening times with the Greek Ministry of Culture.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns” (941).
- C. W. Blegen and M. Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia, vol. I (1966).
- G. Mylonas, Mycenae and the Mycenaean Age (1966).
- Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.16.5-6.
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “Mycenaean Civilization”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003).
