Mycenae

Mycenae, ancient city, near the modern town of Minaiki, in the plain of Argolis, Greece, which was founded in the 16th century bc, during the Early Bronze Age, but which reached its height in the 14th and 13th centuries bc, during the Late Bronze Age, replacing Minoan culture as the most powerful entity. With Troy, Tiryns, and Pylos (near modern Pílos), it was one of the principal cities of what later came to be known as Mycenaean culture, and is the most important Late Bronze Age city of the Greek mainland.

The Mycenaeans, referred to as Achaeans by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey, may be identified with the tribes that arrived in Greece around 2000 bc as part of the Indo-European migration. Their language, an early Greek dialect and a member of the Indo-European linguistic group, was written in a script known as Linear B. Mycenae was first investigated by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1876. The site, a natural citadel between two ravines, was occupied in the Early and Middle Bronze Age. By the Late Bronze Age, Mycenae was a fortified city defended by cyclopean walls (ramparts built of massive blocks of stone). The citadel, approached through the famous Lion Gates, enclosed a royal palace decorated with frescos, various houses for retainers, and storerooms, and some 30 royal graves, most of them shaft graves, arranged in two circles. Other houses stood outside the citadel. A wealth of objects in gold, silver, and bronze, including a gold mask that Schliemann fancifully named “the mask of Agamemnon”, was discovered in the royal graves. Equally fancifully, Schliemann identified tholos (beehive) tombs that he excavated at Mycenae as the Treasury of Atreus and the Tomb of Clytemnestra. Other significant finds include clay tablets with inscriptions in Linear B, an early form of Greek, which confirmed that the Mycenaeans were Greek-speaking.

In about 1400 bc the Mycenaeans appear to have gained ascendancy over the Minoans, thus replacing the latter as the dominant people of the Aegean Civilization. In the Iliad, Homer recounts that the Mycenaeans, led by Agamemnon, of the House of Atreus, were among the main participants in the Trojan War. Soon after 1200 bc, along with the other main centres of Aegean civilization, Mycenae lost its supremacy. The reasons for this decline are unclear, and may lie in a combination of political instability, the arrival of the Dorians from the north, and such environmental factors as drought or famine. Although Mycenae continued to be inhabited, it never regained its former splendour. In about 468 bc it was again besieged and destroyed, this time by the inhabitants of Argos, and never rebuilt.

The archaeological site at Mycenae was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999.