The Mycenaeans: the world of Agamemnon

About 3,600 years ago, long before Athens and Sparta became famous, a rich civilisation grew up in mainland Greece. We call its people the Mycenaeans, after their richest city, Mycenae (Μυκῆναι), in the north-east of the Peloponnese. Their world lasted from about 1600 to 1100 BC, in the Late Bronze Age, when tools and weapons were made of bronze.

The Mycenaeans spoke an early form of Greek, so they are the first Greeks whose words we can read. Homer called the Greeks of his heroic age Achaeans (Ἀχαιοί), and in his poems they are the heroes who sailed to Troy. The Mycenaeans learned a lot from the older Minoan civilisation of Crete, and their influence reached from Asia Minor, the Near East and Egypt to the western Mediterranean.

There was no single Mycenaean country. There were several kingdoms, each with its own palace: Mycenae and Tiryns in the Argolid, Pylos in Messenia, Thebes in Boeotia and others. Each palace was the centre of government, trade, the army and religion for the land around it.

At the heart of a Mycenaean palace was the megaron (μέγαρον), a large hall with a round hearth in the middle and four wooden columns around it. This was the throne room of the ruler. At Pylos, the palace built shortly after 1300 BC had more than 100 rooms on its ground floor: living quarters, workshops, and storerooms full of jars.

The ruler had a special title, wanax, the word that later Greeks wrote as ἄναξ, “lord”. Homer still uses it: Agamemnon is “ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν”, “lord of men” (Iliad 1.7). Modern Greek ανάκτορο, “palace”, belongs to the same family of words. Homer also calls Agamemnon βασιλεύς, the word that became today’s βασιλιάς, “king”.

Palace scribes kept their accounts on small clay tablets, in a script called Linear B. The tablets list what the palace owned, collected and gave out, and they tell us a lot about how a Mycenaean state was run. The first Linear B tablets on the Greek mainland were found at Pylos in 1939. In 1952 the architect Michael Ventris showed that the script was Greek, building on years of work by the scholar Alice Kober. These tablets are the oldest Greek writing we know.

Mycenaean palaces stood on hills, inside huge walls, the τείχη. The stones are so big that later Greeks could not believe that people had moved them. The travel writer Pausanias says that the walls of Tiryns and Mycenae were the work of the Cyclopes (Κύκλωπες), the one-eyed giants of myth. At Tiryns, he writes, a pair of mules could not move even the smallest stone (Pausanias 2.25.8). Archaeologists still call this style Cyclopean: enormous rough blocks, with small stones pushed into the gaps and no mortar. At Tiryns the walls are up to 8 metres thick and 13 metres high.

The main entrance to Mycenae is the Lion Gate (Πύλη των Λεόντων), with two stone lions carved above the doorway. Pausanias saw it too (2.16.5). It was added when the walls were extended in the 13th century BC; scholars give dates between about 1300 and 1250 BC.

The Mycenaeans also built grand tombs. In the 16th century BC, rulers were buried in deep shaft graves with weapons, cups and gold death masks. Later the ruling families used tholos tombs (θόλος), round stone chambers with a high roof shaped like a beehive. The most famous is the so-called Treasury of Atreus, which was in fact a tomb. No wonder Homer calls Mycenae “πολύχρυσος”, “rich in gold” (Iliad 11.46).

In Greek myth, Mycenae was the city of King Agamemnon, son of Atreus, who led the Greeks against Troy. Homer’s Iliad tells of his quarrel with Achilles, and Greek tragedy tells of his murder when he came home. But was he a real person?

In 1876 the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann dug inside the walls of Mycenae and found the rich graves of Grave Circle A. He linked one of the gold masks with Agamemnon, and it is still called the “Mask of Agamemnon”. Today we know that these shaft graves date from the 16th century BC, about three hundred years before the time when tradition places the Trojan War. So the mask belonged to an earlier ruler. The gold masks are now displayed in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Historians do not know whether Agamemnon really lived, and they disagree about how much of the Trojan War story is history. What is certain is that around 1200 BC many palaces were destroyed; the palace of Pylos burned in a great fire. The causes are still debated: unrest, economic decline, movements of peoples across the Mediterranean and strong earthquakes. By the 11th century BC the Mycenaean world had ended, but the memory of “golden Mycenae” lived on in Homer.