Mycenaean civilisation takes its name from Mycenae in the Peloponnese, the city Homer calls "rich in gold" and the kingdom of Agamemnon. It was the first Greek-speaking civilisation: the Mycenaeans are the Achaeans of the Iliad, the warriors of the Trojan War.
Citadels
The Mycenaeans lived in small kingdoms ruled by a king, the wanax, who lived in a fortified palace on a hill. At its heart was the megaron, a great hall with a round central hearth and the throne. The walls were built of stone blocks so huge that later Greeks thought the Cyclopes had made them: hence Cyclopean walls.
| Site | What to see |
|---|---|
| Mycenae | The Lion Gate, Grave Circle A, the palace, the "Treasury of Atreus" |
| Tiryns | The most massive Cyclopean walls, with vaulted galleries |
| Pylos | The best-preserved "Palace of Nestor" and the tomb of the "Griffin Warrior" |
| Thebes and Orchomenos | Palace remains and the "Treasury of Minyas" |
| Gla | A vast fortress in Boeotia |
The gold of kings
In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann, who had already dug at Troy, found the shaft graves of Grave Circle A at Mycenae, full of gold: diadems, cups, weapons and funeral masks. Seeing the finest, he is said to have claimed he had gazed on the face of Agamemnon. In fact the Mask of Agamemnon is about three centuries older than the traditional date of the Trojan War. Later kings were buried in tholos tombs, huge stone domes like the so-called Treasury of Atreus. The treasures of Mycenae are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Linear B
Thousands of clay tablets in Linear B have been found in the palaces of Pylos, Knossos, Mycenae and Thebes, preserved because the fires that destroyed the palaces baked them. In 1952 the English architect Michael Ventris, with philologist John Chadwick, showed the language was an early form of Greek. The tablets are mostly administrative records: rations, flocks, chariots, weapons, offerings to the gods. They already name gods such as Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes and Dionysus.
Trade and war
The Mycenaeans traded across the Mediterranean, from Egypt to Sicily, Sardinia and Apulia, and replaced the Minoans as the Aegean power. They were warriors: boar's-tusk helmets, bronze armour like the Dendra panoply, swords and chariots appear in tombs and frescoes.
Collapse
Around 1200 BC almost all the Mycenaean palaces were destroyed and abandoned, at the same time as the Hittite empire and other eastern Mediterranean kingdoms fell. The causes are debated: earthquakes, drought, internal revolt, invasions by the mysterious "Sea Peoples", the crisis of a highly centralised economy. There followed the so-called Dark Age, in which even writing was lost. The memory of that world survived in myth and in the poems of Homer.
See also Minoan civilisation and archaeology in Greece.