Mycenae is a Bronze Age citadel on a 274-metre (899 ft) hill in Argolis, in the north-eastern Peloponnese of Greece, about 120 km south-west of Athens and 11 km north of Argos. Between roughly 1600 and 1100 BCE it was the leading centre of the civilisation that now carries its name, with a citadel and lower town of around 30,000 people at its peak in about 1350 BCE. Visitors still enter through the Lion Gate of about 1250 BCE, pass the royal shaft graves where Heinrich Schliemann found the gold "Mask of Agamemnon" in 1876, and climb to the palace on the summit. UNESCO listed Mycenae, together with nearby Tiryns, as a World Heritage Site in 1999.
The best way to understand the site is the way its rulers meant it to be seen: from the gate inward and upward. What follows takes that route, from the threshold to the hidden water supply at the back of the citadel, with a detour down the hill to the largest and most elaborate beehive tomb known from the Mycenaean world.
The Lion Gate, Built Around 1250 BCE
The main entrance sits on the north-west side of the citadel and was built in the middle of the Late Helladic IIIB period, around 1250 BCE, when the Cyclopean wall was pushed outward down the west slope. The approach was designed to slow attackers. A rectangular bastion 14.80 m long and 7.23 m wide flanks the ramp on the right, so anyone walking up had their unshielded right side exposed to defenders, and the path narrows into a small court about 15 m by 7.23 m before the gate itself.
The opening is 3.10 m wide and 2.95 m high at the threshold, narrowing slightly towards the top. Two upright monoliths carry a lintel measuring about 4.5 by 2.0 by 0.8 m. Above it the courses of stone are stepped inward to leave a triangular gap, a "relieving triangle" that takes weight off the lintel. Into that gap the builders set a limestone slab carved in high relief with two lionesses facing a Minoan-style column, their front paws resting on an altar-like base. The heads were made separately and are lost.
The relief is the only monumental Mycenaean sculpture to survive and the largest sculpture known from the Bronze Age Aegean. It was never buried, which is why the Greek travel writer Pausanias could describe it in the 2nd century CE, and why the Venetian engineer Francesco Vandeyk was able to use his description to identify the ruins correctly in 1700.
Cyclopean Walls on a 274-Metre Hill
The hill was chosen well. It stands in the north-east corner of the Argive plain, 19 km inland from the Gulf of Argolis, and overlooks the easy routes north to the Isthmus of Corinth. Fortifications on the acropolis were rebuilt around 1350 BCE in the massive style that gave the walls their name. Classical Greeks could not imagine ordinary people lifting such boulders, so they credited the work to the Cyclopes, the one-eyed giants of myth. Pausanias repeated the tradition that the walls of Mycenae and Tiryns were the work of the Cyclopes, and Pliny's Natural History cites Aristotle for the idea that the Cyclopes invented masonry towers.
Archaeologists now use "Cyclopean" for any wall of huge, roughly fitted limestone boulders with smaller stones packed into the gaps, often with clay mortar or none. At Mycenae the largest blocks, including lintels and gate jambs, weighed well over 20 tonnes, and some may have approached 100 tonnes. Only around the gates did the builders switch to cut blocks of conglomerate, the dressed stone that gives the Lion Gate its sharper finish.
Grave Circle A and Schliemann's Gold of 1876
Just inside the gate, south of the ramp, is a ring of upright slabs 27.5 m across. This is Grave Circle A, a royal cemetery of the 16th century BCE that originally lay outside the walls. When the fortifications were extended around 1250 BCE, the builders deliberately looped the new wall around it, a sign that the graves were by then treated as the resting place of ancestral heroes.
Heinrich Schliemann, fresh from his digging at Hisarlik in Turkey, which he took to be Troy, came to Mycenae in 1876 looking for the grave of Agamemnon. Working with the Greek ephor Panagiotis Stamatakis, whom the Archaeological Society had sent to supervise him, he cleared five shaft graves; Stamatakis found a sixth the following year. Together they held 19 people: nine women, eight men and two children. The finds included engraved bronze daggers, gold and silver cups, the Silver Siege Rhyton and a series of gold death masks. In total Circle A held around 15 kg of gold. A second, earlier cemetery, Grave Circle B, used in the 17th and 16th centuries BCE, was found outside the walls in 1951.
Is It Really the Mask of Agamemnon?
The object everyone remembers came out of Grave V on 30 November 1876: a face hammered from a single thick sheet of gold, with a beard and handlebar moustache. Schliemann is supposed to have telegraphed King George I of Greece that he had gazed upon the face of Agamemnon. The mask is now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Two doubts hang over it. The first is about who it shows. The burials date to around the 16th century BCE, some 300 to 400 years before the Trojan War is traditionally set, so it cannot be Homer's king. The second is whether it is genuine at all. From the late 20th century the scholars William Calder III and David Traill argued that Schliemann, known for salting digs, could have had it made and planted. They pointed to its three-dimensional modelling, cut-out ears and full beard, which differ from the other, flatter masks. Defenders reply that the excavation was closed on 26 and 27 November and only reopened under witnesses arranged by Stamatakis, and that the beard closely matches the mane of a gold lion-head rhyton from Grave IV. Current research suggests the mask is genuine Bronze Age work, just not Agamemnon's.
A Detour Down the Hill: the Treasury of Atreus
Outside the citadel walls lies the largest of Mycenae's nine tholos, or beehive, tombs, built between about 1300 and 1250 BCE. Its names, Treasury of Atreus and Tomb of Agamemnon, are modern guesses that probably date to the 18th century; Pausanias saw the tomb but did not link it to either ruler.
A walled passage, the dromos, runs 36 m long and 6 m wide into the hillside, its conglomerate walls rising from 0.5 m to 10 m at the façade. The doorway is 5.4 m high and 2.7 m wide. Above it rests an inner lintel 8 m long, 5 m deep and 1.2 m thick, weighing around 120 tonnes: the heaviest single block known from Greek architecture. Inside, 33 courses of cut stone close into a corbelled dome 14.5 m across and 13.2 m high. It was the largest dome in the world until the Roman period, and it remains the largest corbelled dome anywhere.
The tomb was emptied long ago. In 1802 Lord Elgin, having failed to remove the Lion Gate relief because it was too large to move, took sculpture and fragments from the Treasury instead, and in 1810 the Ottoman governor Veli Pasha cleared the entrance and removed four large fragments of the green marble half-columns that once flanked the door. The red marble of the façade has been traced to quarries on the Mani peninsula in the southern Peloponnese, and the green marble very probably came from the same source.
Up the Ramp to the Palace Megaron
Back inside the walls, a stepped ramp led from the Lion Gate past Grave Circle A to the summit. The palace that survives there dates to the Late Helladic IIIA:2 phase, with earlier palaces cleared away or built over. Like the palaces at Pylos and Tiryns, it centred on a megaron, a throne room entered from a courtyard through a columned porch. Four columns stood around a raised circular hearth, under an opening in the roof, and the throne was set against a side wall so that anyone entering had a clear view of the ruler. Painted plaster covered the walls and floor.
The ruler's title, known from Linear B tablets at Knossos and Pylos, was wanax. Mycenae's reach was wide: an inscription at Kom el-Hetan in Egypt, from the reign of Amenhotep III, names a place that scholars read as Mycenae, and a scarab of his queen, Tiye, was found in the citadel's cult centre in a space known as the Room of the Idols.
The Secret Cistern Below the Northeast Wall
The last major building work came around 1200 BCE, near the end of Late Helladic IIIB, when the wall was pushed out once more on the north-east. The extension enclosed a sally port and a hidden passage that runs through and under the wall. Built with corbelled stone, it descends some 99 steps to a cistern cut into the rock about 15 m below the surface, filled by a tunnel from a spring on higher ground outside the walls. A citadel that could draw water without opening a gate could hold out against a siege, and the fact that its builders thought this necessary says a good deal about the mood of the late 13th century BCE.
Collapse After 1200 BCE and the 1999 UNESCO Listing
Mycenae was one of many Aegean centres destroyed around 1200 BCE in the Late Bronze Age collapse. The causes are still argued over; proposals include invasion, internal conflict and earthquakes. Unlike many sites it was partly rebuilt, but it no longer ran a literate palace bureaucracy; pottery suggests it regained some wealth before burning once again, and the Mycenaean period is conventionally ended at about 1100 BCE. A temple of Hera later stood on the summit, and Mycenaean soldiers fought the Persians at Thermopylae and Plataea, but in 468 BCE Argos captured the town, expelled its people and razed the walls.
Modern work followed Schliemann. Christos Tsountas cleared much of the citadel between 1884 and 1902, and the British School at Athens dug from 1920 to 1955 under Alan Wace. In 1999 UNESCO inscribed the Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns, citing the Lion Gate, the Treasury of Atreus and the walls of both citadels. To set the citadel against its older Cretan rival, read our guide to the palace of Knossos on Crete; for what came centuries later, see how the Acropolis of Athens developed, and how Mycenae's successors organised themselves in the city-states of ancient Greece.