This month's World Heritage Site

The Stone Fortress at Mycenae

The Lion Gate

Every family – and every culture – it seems, has a black sheep. Most white Australians are descended from 18^th-century convicts, and the Norwegians have their plundering Viking ancestors to contemplate.

For the Greeks, it is the Mycenaeans, the rough-and-tumble folks who started the war with Troy and whose history – both the legendary and factual parts of it – seemed drenched in blood. Legend says that Agamemnon, the king that Homer heralded in the Iliad, sacrificed his daughter so that the gods would give his fleet favorable winds for the passage to Troy. Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, was memorable for taking the children of his brother, Thyestes, and feeding them to him. It gets worse: When Agamemnon returns from the 10-year siege of Troy, his loving wife Clytemnestra kills him.

Outside the realm of legend, the Mycenaeans were a warlike people who controlled the eastern Mediterranean for about 300 years, from 1500 B.C. to 1200 B.C. They were the forerunners of  the Classical Greeks who lay the foundations of Western civilization some 700 years later.

At Mycenae, their capital on the northeastern Peloponnesian Peninsula south of later-day Corinth, they constructed a great stone fortress atop a small hill overlooking a fertile valley. The fortress was notable for its massive stones (which later Greeks would say had been built by the Cyclops) and arches, bold corbelling and burial pits that may have been the final resting places for the likes of Atreus, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.

The fortress was the culminating artifact of a settlement that went back at least 2,500 years, to 4000 B.C., when the first Neolithic people arrived in the area. As the Mycenaeans grew in power and influence, they applied the stone-laying skills they had developed over almost three millennia. The most notable were the ability to build with large stones, about six feet high by 12 feet long, which they fit together with great precision. Their stonework also included smaller polygonal and rectangular rocks applied to interior walls.

Outside the main walls of the fortress were tholos, beehive-shaped stone tombs. To achieve the shape, the builders would lay down a circular line of bricks, then top it with bricks whose inner edges tended ever so slightly closer to the center of the circle. As the structure rose, each successive line of bricks was positioned closer to the center. Eventually, the bricks created a dome. Corbelling required sophisticated engineering skills – the stresses from an unbalanced alignment of bricks would bring badly designed structures crashing down.

The highlight of Mycenae is probably the Lion Gate, a brawny post-and-lintel stone entranceway capped by a huge sculpted triangular stone that depicts two lions (the earliest example of relief sculpture in the Greek world). The gate’s boldness and massiveness mark it as one of the world’s great megalithic works. 

UNESCO declared Mycenae a World Heritage Site in 1999. 

A Side Note 

One of the great mysteries the Mycenaeans left behind them was their language, which they had rendered in a syllabic script that scientists called “Linear B.” From its discovery in 1900, linguists labored to find a key to the language, a Rosetta Stone that would allow them to assign syllables to each of its 64 signs. Despite their best efforts, nobody could decipher it. 

However, in 1952, Michel Ventris, a young English architect who was an amateur linguist and epigraphist (student of the interpretation of inscriptions), announced that he had deciphered Linear B. It was, he declared, an archaic dialect of Greek, fully related grammatically, if not graphically, to the language of Socrates and Plato. 

Scientists rushed to check his claims, astonished that an amateur might have solved a generations-old mystery. They found that Ventris was, indeed, correct. The solution of Linear B allowed archaeologists to construct a far more accurate picture of Mycenaean life.

Unfortunately, as linguists eagerly awaited new exploits by the talented Ventris, his life was cut short in 1956 in an auto accident in France.