Mycenae: Cradle of Bronze Age Greece
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Hi, Tristan here and I have an exciting announcement. The Ancients has been invited to open the London Podcast Festival. We will be recording our very first live show on Thursday 5th September at 7pm at King's Place and being the first live show where we want it to be extra special, so I've invited a friend of the podcast, Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, to join me on stage where we will be diving into the captivating story of the Tower of Babel.

from its first mention in the book of Genesis to the real-life great ancient Babylonian structure that it was based on. Of course, the ancients is nothing without you, so we want you to be there in the audience taking part and asking us your burning questions.

Tickets for the festival always sell fast, so book yourself a seat now at www.kingsplace.co.uk forward slash what's on, or click the link in the show notes of this episode. I really hope to see you there. Athens, Sparta, Corinth, some of the most famous cities of the ancient Greek world.

But centuries before these cities rose to prominence, there was another great centre in mainland Greece. The home of famous mythical Bronze Age figures such as Agamemnon, king of the Greeks and leader of their forces in the Trojan War, but also his wife and in some stories murderer, Clytemnestra. This city was Mycenae. It's the ancients on history hit.

I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're talking all about the Bronze Age city of Mycenae, more than 3,000 years old. Overlooking the Argyllid plain in the eastern Peloponnese today, Mycenae was a powerful Bronze Age city.

You can visit it today. You can walk through its cyclopean stone walls, enter the monumental Tholos tombs, the treasuries of Atreus and Clytemnestra. You can gaze upon the great palatial center from where kings ruled. You can see the remains of a Bronze Age Mycenaean road.

Mycenae was a rich and powerful city back in the Bronze Age. I've been to the site and it is without a doubt one of my favourite places in the world. Up there with the likes of Clach Tzolabroch and the Temple of Luxor. So I'm delighted to now be doing an episode all about it.

To talk through Mycenae's archaeology, from gold face masks to the great lion entrance gate, well I was delighted to interview Dr. Jorrit Kelder, an expert on the Mycenaeans and the great bastion that was Mycenae. Now we recorded this episode in person at History Hit HQ a few months back. It was really good fun and I really do hope you enjoy.

Jorrit, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for having me. You're more than welcome. And to do it in person, here we are at History Hit HQ to talk about what must be one of the greatest sites in Greece. I mean, in the Bronze Age, Mycenae, this feels like one of those

important centres of the Mediterranean world? It really was, at least in, say, the Late Bronze Age, so the period between approximately 1600 and 1200 BC. It really was one of the major centres. Exactly how major it was is one of the bones of contention, so to say, in scholarly debate at the moment. But it certainly was in terms of cultural outreach. It really was a heavy weight, especially for the Aegean, but well beyond that as well. And

And set the scene, whereabouts in Greece are we talking with Mycenae? So I guess most people will know Athens, the current capital of Greece, which incidentally was also a major centre in the Mycenaean era. That's less well known, but the Acropolis was until the Persian attack. Actually, you could still see the Mycenaean remains. So there was like a citadel wall around the rock. So Mycenae is basically, say, two hours west of Athens. So it's situated in the Archelid, which is a

relatively large valley in the Peloponnese, a peninsula to the west of Athens, the mainland. When we're talking about the Bronze Age in Greece, whenabouts are we talking when Mycenae was occupied and so dominant? The Bronze Age is roughly speaking, and you've got to remember that these dates are all very approximate, but the Bronze Age as a whole is roughly speaking the period between, say, 3000 BC and roughly speaking 1100-1000 BC.

In the Aegean, elsewhere it's different. So that's the problem with these relative chronologies. Mycenae was particularly important in what we call the Late Bronze Age. So that's the period between about 1600 to 1200 BC. It was occupied a little bit before that and after that, but its main flora, its main phase

was between 1600 and 1200 BC. So more than 3000 years ago, for that far back in ancient Greece, what types of sources do we have to learn more about it? Do we have writing or is it mainly archaeology? Well, the main reason why it's famous is of course Homer. The Trojan War and the stories of Agamemnon leading the whole alliance to Troy. That's really why Mycenae has become so famous and that's why we know it as gold in Mycenae, Mycenae rich in gold.

But apart from archaeology, and I'm sure we'll talk about that much more later on, but we do actually have some writing. It's called Linear B. It's an early form of Greek, and we have them on clay tablets. So that's probably a way of writing that they adopted principally from Minoan Crete, which is another neighboring culture on Crete, but eventually a practice that came from the Near East where writing, of course, was known since at least 3000 B.C.,

The problem with these Linear B texts, they're interesting though. They are very pretty to look at, little pictorial drawings almost in rows, but they don't really convey all that much. They're administrative texts, and importantly, they also date to the final years of the Mycenaean palaces.

mostly shortly before 1200 BC. So they don't really tell us a lot about the earlier phases of Mycenaean civilization. But we do have some texts from the Mycenaean world. And very interestingly, we also have some texts from other parts of the eastern Mediterranean, regions where the Mycenaeans were active, regions that they traded with. But in some cases, and I'm talking especially about Hittite Anatolia, so that's what we now know as Turkey,

We do have cuneiform texts from Turkey referring to a country called Achaiava. And that's almost certainly the Hittite designation for what we later came to know as Achaia, one of the designations in Homer for Greece. Ah, Achaiava. Ah, right, yes. And those are more rather than the Linear B text. Linear B texts are really fairly dry. They're administrative texts, so lists of people, personnel, taxes, things like that. So interesting, but not really interesting. Right.

But the Hittite texts really are far more historically interesting. So we have names of potentially even a ruler, but also diplomatic texts. So we have Hittite kings shouting at their Achaemen counterparts for, for example, kidnapping apparently Anatolian people, possibly even to build some of the walls in Byzantine Greece and things like that. So you have actually a sort of a diplomatic correspondence there. There's evidence in those texts as well that the Achaemen king wrote back

And what's very interesting, and I'm sure we'll talk about that later on, is that in two of those texts, the king of Achiaba is referred to as a Lugalgal, which is the Akkadian that the Hittites used in international… much like English nowadays. They used an international language to communicate with their foreign peers. And they used the word Lugalgal for the king of Achiaba, and that basically translates as a great king, say an emperor. So

Whoever this king of Achiaba was and wherever he resided, I think he resided at Mycenae for various reasons, but it's quite clearly one, if not the major site in Greece at that time. This king of Mycenae or of Achiaba must have been someone pretty important and clearly also ruled a significant size of territory.

Well, let's go through this kind of layout of Mycenae at that time. You mentioned that this great king may well have resided at Mycenae. So let's start right at the centre. What is this building that we believe this royal figure would have resided in?

Well, so the texts from the Hittite side range from about 1400 BC to about 1220 BC. So the last two centuries of what we call palatial Greece, so when the palaces on the mainland really flourished.

But Mycenae, as I said before, was already occupied a bit earlier. So from around the late 17th century BC, you see that it becomes especially important as a place for burial, actually. So we have several important graves, Grave Circle B, but most notably Grave Circle A, famous throughout the world for the finds that Schliemann made there, a famous archaeologist. Grave Circle A was later included in the perimeter wall of the citadel, but initially lay outside it.

So it was an important place for burial. And there are various thoughts about who was buried there, but clearly very wealthy people with clear connections to Minoan Crete. Lots of the stuff that was found there, lots of gold, swords with inlay, masks, golden death masks, precious vessels. One is a very famous, what we call a rythan, a ceremonial vessel in the shape of a bull's head.

Stuff like that, but with a very clear Minoan sort of touch to it, probably made to a large extent in Crete. So it was principally a burial ground for the very wealthy. Now, we don't really know where these very wealthy people resided. Presumably somewhere in the Archive Plain, the region around Mycenae. And most likely, some of them already lived on the top of the citadel nearby. But due to later occupation, we don't have a lot of evidence for this. But from around, say, 1400 BC onwards,

We really have good evidence for a monumental building on top of the Acropolis of Mycenae, so just a little bit beyond Grave Circle A. And later on, from the 13th century BC, you really have a massive expansion of that citadel with the erection of what we know as the Lion Gate, a huge monumental gate to the citadel, which also came to include the Grave Circle A.

If we talk about the geography a bit more, because you mentioned there how this citadel, they created it overlooking this fertile plain. It's a really dominant position. But how important is that plain? You mentioned the argolid to sustaining life for the people who lived at somewhere like Mycenae. It feels like it's absolutely vital.

It must have been, almost certainly. The interesting thing about Mycenae, though, is that it's not, in terms of geography, a logical place to really dominate the Archelid. It's sort of situated in the northeastern corner of the Archelid, in a sort of side valley. And yes, you can see quite a large chunk of the Archelid, but other places like nearby Argos, which was a major center in early Mycenaean times and before that, and obviously became a huge and important center afterwards in the archaic and classical time.

Arthas is actually far better situated to dominate the plain, and it did so throughout the ages. Mycenae itself really is in that sense sort of an outlier, but because of its position, it did control the routes that entered the Archlyt from the north. So current thinking is that it did not only control at least a large chunk, in my view probably all of the Archlyt, but also the region to the north, so Corinthia, the area where later Corinth arose.

One of the reasons for this is we found patches of roads and indeed some of those roadworks were so well constructed that the bridges, we have a few of those. One is very close to Mycenae, another one is a little bit further on towards later Empidauros where we have the famous theater. But some of those bridges survived the times and were indeed still used in the 19th and early 20th century. So there's a picture of this Mycenaean bridge probably built around 1300 BC.

near Kazarma, near Epidaurus, with a car on top of it. So these things were massive. And because of these roadworks, we think that it probably controlled not only the Argyll, but also the area to the north of it. What argues in favor of that as well is that there were no major sites, no major Mycenaean sites in the area of later Corinth. So it was quite clear that Mycenae probably had usurped that area quite early on and didn't allow for any competition.

So you mentioned how at the start Mycenae is more of this burial location for these elites and then it gets added on to more and more, becomes this great bastion, this citadel when it reaches its zenith. When we look through the interior of Mycenae today, should we start with the walls themselves? You mentioned the Lion Gate earlier. What exactly is this wall circuit that is so iconic of Mycenae today?

Yeah, so the Lion Gate is actually a fairly late addition. So that's midway, first half of the 13th century BC, as far as we know now, at least. I mean, these dates always change as we dig further. But yeah, the sort of iconic appearance of Mycenae that we see today if we visit the place includes this huge fortification wall of the citadel with this massive gate at the front. The

The Lion Gate got its name, of course, because of, and it's quite rare, we don't have a lot of monumental sculpture, because a large sculpture of two, how do you say, almost sort of prowling lions facing towards a column just above the gate. It's massive. I think off the top of my head, it's something like four meters in width.

The masonry style is, of course, also very iconic. The walls are made with huge, not completely unworked, but essentially unworked stones. In fact, they were so huge without any mortar and things like that. They were so huge that later Greeks thought they couldn't possibly have been built by normal humans. Hence the name Cyclopic Masonry or Cyclopean Masonry.

But very iconic, and you see that style of defensive architecture primarily in the Archelytes. I would say it seems to be something that's developed or at least flourished in the Archelytes. You do see it also in Athens, as I mentioned. That was a Mycenaean citadel in the 13th century as well.

And I would argue that it was probably something that was built or at least governed from Mycenae itself. So it was like a satellite palace. But in terms of architecture, it's very clearly archived in that sense. But otherwise, you don't see it all that much. So, for example, in Boeotia, there is very little evidence of this, with the sole exception of a major site nowadays called Gla. We don't know how it was named in the Bronze Age.

Maybe Arni, if we follow Homer, but a major site. And that's actually the largest Mycenaean fortress that we know of with a circuit of almost three kilometers in length. It's massive. And as far as I know, they're still digging there. Huge territory to excavate.

But otherwise, this Cyclopean masonry seems to be something that was primarily used in the Archelid and primarily, clearly, for a very important site. So we see it at Mycenae, and we also see it at nearby Tyrrhenes, which almost certainly was the harbour site of Mycenae. Very impressive, even today, very impressive fortress. So is it fair to say that in the Mycenaean world, although – and we'll delve more into the archaeology of Mycenae – it is significant

Can we say it's not entirely unique because you do find these other great bastions like Athens further north which might have similar walls or might have similar importance to the local people? It's certainly not unique. As I said, there are a few other sites like that and definitely there were a number of palaces. This is one of the reasons why a lot of scholars have always argued for almost a classical Greek

layout of the Mycenaean world with different smaller states, all sort of governed from one single palace. So if you have a palace, usually with a Linear B archive, so with an early Greek Mycenaean archive. If you have a palace, that usually equals a state. But as I said, in the Archelyt, you have several of these palaces. So you have Tyrians, you have Mycenae, you probably had something at Argos as well, because in the later Crusader castle,

we find a huge lintel, which almost certainly is of Mycenaean descent, reused in a later wall. So there was probably something going on in Argos as well. And you have nearby Maidea, which is also a major site, also with Cyclopean masonry, all in the Archlyt. So clearly, you had several major centers in the Archlyt. It's inconceivable, really, that those were all independent from each other. So in the Archlyt, you had a number of these major strong points, all with Cyclopean masonry. Elsewhere, not so much.

Athens, certainly, yeah. Chla in Boeotia, certainly. But for example, Thebes, we don't have a very good understanding. And I'm probably going to repeat this several times, and that's the problem with early history in Greece. There's unfortunately, to some extent, a modern city laying over Mycenaean Thebes. So we can't dig everywhere we wanted. But as far as we can see now, there were no Mycenaean or no Cyclopean walls at Thebes. They used smaller stones there. So distinct local architecture in that sense.

At Pelos, a very famous Mycenaean palace in the southwest of the Peloponnese, there's also no wall. There used to be a wall almost certainly in the very earliest phases of Pelos, say in the 16th, 15th century BC, but it seems to have been dismantled and it was never something akin to what we see in the Archlyt. So in that sense, it's quite rare to have a fortification of that scale. I mean, even today, it really makes an impression of power, of might. So that's not coincidental, I think.

Of power and might, you also mentioned kings and these royal figures at Mycenae before, which should lead us on, therefore, to perhaps the most famous figure associated with Mycenae. Why is Agamemnon primarily associated with this site, and who is he? Very good questions to which, in all honesty, I can't really give a 100% certain answer in the sense that Agamemnon is almost certainly Agamemnon.

a fictional character. We know him only from later Greek traditions, primarily, of course, Homer, but also from later tragedies, where he is the leader of the united Greek forces that go to Troy and after 10 years each, finally, sack the city, then return and listen carefully, kids, beware of your wife. He gets murdered when he gets home.

Not wholly strange, though. I mean, he did sacrifice his daughter. Yeah, not a good move. Not a good move. That's probably not something you should do. But anyway, so yeah, he was a leader of the United Greek Forces against Troy. And that's why he's primarily famous. In Homer, he's Alex Andon, the leader of men, so the supreme lord of all the kings in front of Troy. And he is the king of Mycenae. So that's why we know Mycenae as Golden Mycenae.

In terms of actual evidence, we have no evidence whatsoever for an Agamemnon in the Mycenaean world. To my knowledge, the name is not attested in Linear B, for example. This doesn't necessarily mean all that much. As I said, Linear B texts are limited in their historical use. They're mostly lists of taxation and the deployment of people, of goods. So that his name is not there is not necessarily a problem, but we do not have actual evidence for Agamemnon as a person.

As a character, however, I think we do have some evidence there. I mean, in the sense that Mycenae, in terms of monumentality, in terms of scale, and also because of a number of weird features that you don't really see elsewhere, the number of monumental tholos tombs. These are huge beehive tombs, almost certainly used to bury kings and their consorts, all looted, of course, unfortunately. We have a number of those. Off the top of my head, seven at Mycenae, maybe even nine.

So Mycenae really stands out in terms of monumentality, because of the number of tholos tombs, and also because, for example, of the presence of what we call a cult center, so a sort of a sanctuary area close to Grave Circle A. The term cult center is a little bit of a problem. It was not built as a single unit.

But it is sort of a patchwork of little shrines that were used and fell into disuse occasionally that were used throughout the centuries. But all within the palace walls, the 13th century palace walls, that is. So those things we don't really find in any of the other Mycenaean sites. And that really does make Mycenae stand out.

Clearly also, so there's an ideological center. We have the cult center there with strange figurines, terracotta figurines. We might even have some evidence that's something I'm working on now. For the presence of larger composite statues, there is, for example, a famous head now in the Archaeological Museum in Athens.

made of gypsum, known as a sphinx head, but it almost certainly was part of a cult statue. You can still see the cavity in the neck where it was probably affixed to a wooden pole or something like that. And around that pole, one would imagine they had created something maybe out of ivory or whatever, a larger, almost life-sized statue. So

Something was going on at Mycenae. It was important for ideological, religious reasons. And clearly, due to the scale of the walls and the presence of the Lion Gate, that's clearly sort of emblematic for royal power. One would argue that this must have been the political centre par excellence as well. There's a lot of great tomb architecture at Mycenae. The grave circles, you mentioned earlier, Grave Circle A and Grave Circle B, and then these massive monumental tholos tombs outside the walls.

I want to explore those in detail, but just so we get an idea of the chronology exactly, with the walls almost coming in between, are the grave circles from earlier in the Bronze Age and then these massive monumental tholos tombs come later? Essentially, yes. We have grave circle B, which was found later. That's why it's called grave circle B, which includes a number of shaft graves, so basically very simple graves cut into the rock.

going straight down, usually rectangular in shape. And they're mostly from the 17th century BC. And then Grave Circle A, which later was included in the citadel walls, which was far wealthier than the graves found over there. And they mostly date from, say, the late 17th to 16th century BC. And then there is possibly, I mean, all these dates are very sort of tentative, some slight overlap with the first tholos tombs that were erected at Mycenae, although the most monumental of these are

especially the treasury of Atreus. It was probably 13th century BC.

And because those shaft graves weren't as monumental, as visible in the landscape as those tholos tombs, is that why more treasures, more artefacts have been uncovered from the former than the tholos tombs? Well, yes and no. I think that's just a glitch, in fact. We've been lucky in many ways because, yes, they are fairly inconspicuous when compared to the tholos tombs, but then the tholos tombs really do stand out and they were made to stand out. You

If you go into one of those, it's impressive. The quality of the masonry, especially with the later ones, is just astounding.

But yeah, the shaft graves in Grave Circle A especially were quite visible because they do seem to erect grave markers on top of them. Of course, a lot of later activity there, but it does seem very likely that they were sort of special places, conspicuous places in the landscape from the 16th century BC onwards. So basically, whenever they were used, people remembered that. And then in the 13th century, for whatever reason,

I mean, this is, of course, always hypothetical. But for whatever reason, the kings of Mycenae decided that these people in Shafgrave A were important to them. Whether or not there was a direct bloodline, we can't know really. But they sort of re-envisioned this area, made it within the walls, sort of enlarged to the citadel walls, and almost sort of erected a sort of special place around it. So there's a demarcation of a stone wall around this grave circle. They reinstated or re-erected

the original slabs. So this was a place that was known and visible. And when Schliemann came there, of course, it was largely overgrown. I mean, of course, but even Pausanias must have seen it. So this was a place that was known at least until later Roman times. After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal is a podcast that delves into the dark side of history. Expect murder and conspiracy, ghosts and witches.

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So this is Heinrich Schiemann who's excavating in the late 19th century and Pausanias, a Roman or Greek travel writer who comes in the second century AD. So the fact that those amazing treasures from that grave circle have survived is incredible. I mean, let's talk about a few of them now. My mind will immediately go to that incredible artefact at the Archaeological Museum at Athens alongside so many. But the Mask of Agamemnon. Now, Gerard, you're smiling when I say this. I mean, take it away. What is this...

artifact and how does it get this association with the big man Agamemnon? Yeah, that is actually quite interesting in the sense that Schliemann himself actually sent a telegram to the king at that time, Greece was a kingdom, saying, I've gazed upon Agamemnon's face. But the mask that lay upon his Agamemnon was not actually the mask that we see now as the mask of Agamemnon. So the mask that everyone will know is this

fairly magnificent golden sheet with a face on it, fairly stylized. But if you compare it to the other masks that you found in the Grave Circle, it's far more detailed. It has a clear beard. It has a clear mustache. There's something weird about it as well, in the sense that the description that Schliemann gives in his notebook is not entirely 100% match with what we see today.

Some people have suggested that he may have slightly altered the mask. We don't really know. For the moment, I'm quite happy with what it is. But with Slimon, you never really know. He has a tendency to sort of elaborate things.

both on the things that he's found and how he saw it, and maybe even on the finds themselves. So, for example, Troy, it's almost certain that he sort of holds together a number of finds and then made it into a single treasure, things like that. But regardless, this is a very famous death mask, one amongst the many, but the most elaborate of them all, found in the shaft graves. It did cover the face of one of the deceased, but as I said, there were a number of those.

Not only men, interestingly, we also have female burials and even at least two children. And the children are completely covered in gold sheets. That's really interesting. And of course, the question is, where does this tradition come from? It's not necessarily something you see a lot in Greece, elsewhere in Greece at that time. Okay, we don't have a lot of intact burials from the time. But for example, at Pylos, we now have the tomb of the griffin warrior, which is an exciting recent find there.

We don't have a burial mask like that. So it's always been, how do you say, suggested, thought that this may have been something that came through contacts with Egypt. And in a way, that would make sense because the gold that we find at Mycenae, and especially in those shaft graves, loads of it, must have come from somewhere. And gold, usually in the Old World, came from Egypt. I mean, that was the main reason.

export product of that country. And we know that from lots of finds, but also from texts, for example. So we have lots of other Near Eastern kings who write to the king of Egypt, like, send me lots of gold, because we know it's as plentiful as sand in your country. So maybe it came from there. But there's another exciting but less known option, that it is the sort of very wealthy culmination of a much earlier tradition that was also known on the steppe.

It's very difficult to say what's right, but the Egypt connection does seem to ring true to some extent. I love that connection to these other places in the Eastern Mediterranean world that you find with so many artefacts from ICNI, don't you? Imagining just what it must have been like

Walking through the streets, there could have perhaps been Egyptian traders, there could have been Hittites, Assyrians, that whole Near Eastern world. It really emphasises through the artefacts how interconnected this bastion was at that time. And it's reflected in its art and in its architecture too. Absolutely, absolutely. And at the time of the shaft graves, it's quite clear that Mainon Crete still was the sort of main hub for international connections in the Aegean.

But especially towards, say, the end of the 15th century, the mainland, and Mycenae especially, really takes over and becomes the main connector, basically, to the Near East. But even in the Shavka, as you can already see that, there's lots of import from Minoan Crete. But also, for example, there's a beautiful...

We call it, again, a rythm, a ritual vessel in the shape of a stack made out of silver, almost certainly from Anatolia, from Turkey. And there are Egyptian imports. Now, these may have all come to Mycenae via Crete.

We don't really know. I think it's quite likely that some of this came fairly directly just to the mainland. And in later times, there is a very good evidence for direct connections. I've written extensively about this as well. So from the reign of Amenhotep III, we have a description in his mortuary temple in Thebes in the south of Egypt, where there's actually a sort of, call it a periplus, like a sort of a round trip around the world as Amenhotep knew it.

And of course, we see all the known major countries, Babylon, the Hittites and stuff like that. But we also have two countries that are less familiar, I think, to most of the listeners today. So Keftiu, which is the

a fairly well attested name for Crete, but also Taniu, which is slightly less well known, but it's on the same sort of slab and almost certainly is an Egyptian reference to the Crete mainland. It may even compare to another Danaoe, one of the classical names for the royal family in WCB, and also one of the names that Homer uses, incidentally.

And what is more interesting to this is that beneath these two designations for countries, we have a number of toponyms and lists of places. Not all of these are well identified, but a number of these are very clear. And one amongst these is Mycenae, Mycenaeus. Mycenaeus. Yeah. So it's, I mean, that's a hundred percent match. So Mycenaeus was clearly, Mycenaeus was clearly one of the main centers in Tanaeum.

So the Egyptians clearly knew of this region. Now, you can still argue that this was via Middlemen and Crete or whatever. But given that we have this list, we also have a lot of stuff. For example, Fayence plaquettes, little sort of plaques with the name of Amenhotep III stamped on it.

They have been found on the Acropolis of Mycenae and lots of other, like Phionceville, apes and things like that. It's quite cool. There's a lot of import there, and it was quite clearly a cosmopolitan age. I love that. When anything talking about the Bronze Age, whether it's that area around the Near East or it's Mycenae or it's Crete and so on. I'm glad we got that in there.

Let's go outside the walls a bit longer before we talk about the palace and other bits of architecture. But we have mentioned those great tholos tombs, these treasuries. Yeah.

Jorrit, we need to talk about these in a bit more detail because they are so stunning today. What will you see when you go to the entrance of one of these tholos tombs? Describe the architecture to us. Right. The most monumental of these is, again, the treasury of Atreus, built in 13th century BC, probably. Again,

massive scale of the thing that is really something that stands out. So you'd approach it via a dromos, like a sort of processional way, which on either way... So these tombs, they have the shape of beehives and then covered with a heap of earth. So they look basically like huge hills in the landscape. And this dromos was sort of set in that hillside.

on either way monumental walls to keep the earth from falling in. Unlike most of the walls at Mycenae, these rocks, these stones used for the drummers were nicely dressed, a bit like the Bastion near the Lion Gate. It's far more formal as we would recognize it, like nice lines, well dressed, very beautifully carved, but again still massive. Some of these stones weighed tons. And then above the entrance there was again a large triangular carving

which included, we have some of the fragments, it included bulls and probably also spiral motifs. But again, largely gone, unfortunately. Bits of it were found by the excavators, but also by Lord Elgin of infamy. And in fact, some of the pillars that stood on either, or half pillars really, that stood on either side of the entrance are now to be seen in the British Museum. That probably...

I hope I'm not… Ah, hence you'll go to this after this interview. Yes, yes. There's no call for the return of these, though, so far. But yeah, they're pretty stunning in many ways. Beautiful half-pillar set against the sides. And that's basically the entrance to the tomb proper. And the inside is, of course, this massive dome, really, beehive-shaped. So it's pointed towards the top with a capstone that really sort of secured the stability of the whole edifice.

What we see now is obviously stripped, but it's almost certain that the interior was once clad with lots of decoration in bronze, maybe gold, precious stones. And on one side of the tomb, there's a rectangular little side room. And I suspect this must have been the place where the main burial was situated.

You look at that masonry today when you walk in one of those places, whether it is the great cyclopean walls of Mycenae or Tyrens, or the stonework on the interior of one of those great treasuries, like the treasury of Atreus or Clytemnestra or Agamemnon, all of those. All those names from mythology and the Trojan War and what happens next in Aeschylus.

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When you look at that, you really appreciate how masterful these masons must have been to be able to do wonders like that with dry stone. There's this method of corbelling, isn't it? It is, yeah. It's absolutely stunning and one of the hallmarks of Mycenaean palatial architecture, really. But again, I keep repeating it, but I think it's important. It's something that you find especially, not exclusively, but especially at Mycenae.

especially in these quantities, especially in this quality. Although I have to say the walls of Tyre are truly magnificent as well. But then again, it's essentially next door. So this really was an advertisement of power, really.

These places were in that sense also… They may have been closed when there was a burial, but they were probably reopened. I don't think they were necessarily for one single burial. It's highly likely, and we see it in the Near East as well, that there were several people buried in a tomb like that, and that the old burial was then just put aside when someone new came in, so to say. They were almost certainly also places for ancestor cults, and you see that in later maps as well. I mean,

And we know this from the Near East as well. The dead were amongst the living. And that's something that's also interesting. So, of course, these major tombs were outside the citadel wall. But outside the citadel wall, you also have habitation.

It's likely that most of the burial grounds were set apart from this habitation, but quite close, really. For example, the tomb of Ketamnestra is very close to a number of so-called houses, which were essentially sort of ministries, as far as we can see. Fairly monumental houses just outside the citadel, probably used for specific purposes, like export of olive oil, things like that, ivory, gold.

Maybe a workshop or so, but clearly sort of elite manufacturing and export. But there must have been houses for the commoners to some extent nearby as well. And obviously, excavations continue, so we don't know precisely the extent of this lower town. But it does look like there was quite an extensive area of habitation in the 13th century as well around the citadel, maybe even with a now-gone wall.

Well, as we also mentioned with the importance of the argolid earlier and actually the seismicina, as you said, most people would not be living within the walls. That was kind of reserved, wasn't it, for those really high figures? Yeah, that was really the place for it. I always object a little bit against the idea that Greece, at any point in its history really, but certainly not in the Mycenaean period, was something necessarily special. I mean, it is of course special. It's stunning to see even now.

But it was very much part of a wider world, part of the ancient Near East to a large extent. We know this because they communicated with, for example, the Hittites and they traded and probably also communicated with the Egyptians.

But also with areas to the north, probably we have less evidence for this. But it was very well connected. So in many ways, I think when we have a gap in our evidence in Greece, it's worthwhile comparing it to what we know from neighboring civilizations. And there we clearly see that the citadel was a place, and even later, for example, medieval Europe, the citadel was a place where you'd have the main cult place and where you'd have the main center for political power and the army. I mean, that goes hand in hand.

Now, a bit less glamorous, but I believe it's still within the walls of Mycenae. And I have an absolute fascination, an unhealthy obsession with ancient sewer systems and ancient drainage, particularly from the Bronze Age. And when it's revealed how far back, you know, you have like the world's first flushable toilet at Knossos, I believe is a famous fact, isn't it? And other places as well with drainage going back thousands of years. Did Mycenae have sewers and drains too?

Well, to some extent. Not quite the scale of Knossos, but for example in Tiryns we have a bathing area, called the shower area, next to the palace. Again, monumental in scale. The shower slab, the place on which you stand when you're having your bath or your shower, is massive. And that clearly had a drain that goes underneath the floors and to make sure that whatever you were using, possibly olive oil, perfumed olive oil as well, to scrape off any dirt, as in later times.

that was effectively removed from the area. Similar things should have been there at Mycenae. Again, the Acropolis to a large extent was gone because of landslides. Part of the palace, for example, has gone into the gorge next door. But it is quite clear that they knew how to work with water, so to say. And one of the most stunning pieces of evidence for that is the so-called well in the citadel. So towards the end of the palace period, the very end of the 13th century BC,

the Lords of Mycenae decided that they needed to secure water access to the citadel. And there is a nearby spring, Persea, I think it's called. And they built a little extension to the citadel wall with an underground access point where water would always flow in. Unfortunately, when I visited Mycenae for the first time in the 90s, I think, when I was still a kid,

You could still go all the way down. Clearly someone hurt himself or maybe the rocks became a little bit unstable. You can't go all the way down nowadays. It's barred. But it's quite extensive and goes quite deep. So there's a whole access point, subterranean well, within the citadel walls there. And again, my CV is not unique in this, but it's clear that they knew how to build these things and how to work with water.

We have something similar, incidentally, in Mycenaean Athens. Less well-known, but there's a well there as well, built around the same time, late 13th century BC. So clearly a time when people perceived a threat, I guess, to the elite, and they needed to make sure that they could drink when they couldn't really leave the place. So there's one in Athens as well. Unfortunately, you can't access it. But yeah, all Mycenaean.

When talking about the palace itself, which seems to dominate the interior of the Sisto at Mycenae,

How does it compare, or how did it compare, do we know from the surviving archaeology to, let's say, the other great Bronze Age palace that we think of, which would be Knossos? It's entirely different from Knossos. Knossos really followed a Minoan Cretan tradition, although there may be some parallels with, for example, Abla in Syria. But the typical Mycenaean palace, as we find it at least in the 14th and 13th century BC, is that of a so-called Megaron. And to make this easier, I mean…

I'm Dutch, of course, and I don't want to subject the listeners too much to my accent. Think of the later classical temples, at least in terms of its ground plan, the map. So what you'd have is a populon, usually like a sort of portal with usually two pillars through which you would enter, and then a large rectangular space with earth in the center. And then usually the throne of the ruler would be to the right of it when you enter.

So a propylon portal towards the main space. Much like the later temples, with the distinction, of course, that the later temples had pillars around the whole structure, and we don't have evidence for that in the Mycenaean times. What is interesting, though, is if you look at these later temples, these, of course, have all a pitched roof.

And we really don't know the roof situation in Mycenaean Greece. So some reconstructions are flat-roofed, but I think there's actually quite a good case to be made, at least in some locations, that some of these palaces were like later temples with a pitched roof. At Pylos, for example, this is also quite interesting, we even have evidence maybe for a sort of a first floor, but certainly for a chimney. We found remains of a chimney. So these things were quite complex in many ways.

But unlike what we find in Minoan creed, having said that, of course, they did take a lot of elements from the Minoans. And I'm now talking especially about iconography, iconography of power, so a lot of frescoes.

But unlike the Cretans, the motives that the Mycenaeans chose tend to be slightly more warlike. So, for example, at Mycenae we have evidence of, for example, soldiers reigning in horses and things like that in the throne room. At Pylos we have evidence for battle scenes, things like that. You don't really see that in Minoan Crete, which has given rise for the myth, because it really is a myth, that the Minoans were very peaceful and, you know, flower-loving hippies, basically.

That's absolutely untrue. A good friend of mine, Barry Molloy, has completely dispelled this myth. But in terms of expression of power, the Mycenaeans clearly focused a little bit more on the marginal side of things. Although there were lots of things like processions as well. And this is also something that bears stressing. So we're talking about a Mycenaean world, and to some extent that's absolutely justified. You can see a lot of similarities between the various palaces and settlements throughout Greece in the 14th and 13th century BC.

Pottery styles are largely the same, at least to the 1250 BC, and very clearly also archive-inspired. But there are, of course, also some regional differences. For example, the palace in Thebes seems to have been slightly different, and the earlier phases of the palace at Pylos was also slightly different. Actually, those two palaces seem to be far more Minoan-inspired, so that's quite interesting to see.

But at Pelos, which we know quite well, it's really interesting to see that at some point around 1300 BC, perhaps slightly earlier, the older palace was partly sort of cleared. And what they built in instead is a very clear Mycenaean archive megarome. So at some point, and I think that's the point when someone at Mycenae really decided like, right, time to really sort of fix things there and get some direct control.

and sort of build a palace for a local vessel in that area in the Mycenaean archive style. So these things are very interesting to look at. Of course, this is all hypothetical. It's very difficult to reconstruct political boundaries and political structures on the basis of archaeology alone. But it is very interesting to see how sort of local traditions from the early Mycenaean era are sometimes completely swept aside or partly swept aside and make space for archive collections.

That evolution of architectural ideas more than 3,000 years ago. It is absolutely stunning. I mean, one last thing before we completely wrap up. One other thing I remember from talking to Andrew Shapland about Knossos and the tablets there, he mentioned how most of the administrative tablets discovered at the Knossos Palace was due with sheep. Now, with the palace at Mycenae and the Linear B tablets there,

What do they largely talk about? Do they similarly talk all about livestock, or is there more of a mix? It's slightly more of a mix. Then again, Mycenae hasn't yielded the largest amount of Linear B texts. But what we do have, of course, also agriculture, because any civilization prior to basically the Industrial Revolution was focused on agriculture. That's where the wealth came from, principally.

But we also see reference to olive oil. And in fact, I mentioned Egypt before with Amenhotep III, but his son, the famous Akhenaten, like the guy who abolished the gods, apparently, didn't really, but to some extent,

During his reign, we see a huge import of Mycenaean stirrup jars and pilgrim flasks, so basically amphorae before the amphorae was created. So vessels that came, and we've done some testing on the clay, that clearly came from the area around Mycenae, so Bambati or the Corinthia. They were all made in that area. Virtually all of them, maybe a few exceptions.

And it's entirely conceivable, I think very likely even, that what you see there is, we were talking about something like 900 vessels really, so a huge quantity, single shipment, I think, that what we have there is probably something like a diplomatic mission coming from the Mycenaean world. As I said, we have some evidence for an Egyptian mission to that area. We had that list and we have these rare faience plaques from Ammonautic the 3rd that were found on the Acropolis.

I think that we may have some evidence there for a return trip from Mycenae. Indeed, in some of these houses beyond the walls, we did find tablets listing, for example, the production of olive oil. We shouldn't necessarily think of olive oil as something like the olive oil that we use today, a fairly mundane kind of thing. This really was the perfume of its age. It really was a status symbol. Some of the things that we might now conceive as fairly normal, mundane stuff are

made me very rare and sort of elite back in those days. There you go. Olive oil, the elite substance of the Bronze Age. I know, and especially looking at the Near East olive oil production, how vital it is to so many of those cities and their economies. Absolutely. And this is also something really interesting. So for example, the olive is actually alien to Egypt. It was not native there. So actually already in 2009, I made an argument that because at some point,

It looks as if the Egyptians actually start having access to fresh olives. For example, in the tomb of Tutankhamun, we have a number of funerary wreaths, including a very tiny little one around his array, a little snake wing on top of his head, made out of olive leaves. And these were fresh. So how do you get them?

So they may have come from the Levant, which is possible. But given that we're talking the reign of Tutankhamun, that's the son almost certainly of Akhenaten, given that we have this huge influx of olive oil at the time of Akhenaten, and at the same time, we also have a lot of other stuff that looks distinctly Aegean, including a depiction of an olive tree in Amarna, the capital of Akhenaten.

I've made the argument that what we have here is that apart from olive oil, part of this mission may have also included, and we know that the Egyptians were interested in this kind of stuff. They've listed it in temples and things like that. Also part of like olive trees, maybe olive trees that were then planted in Egypt,

probably from the temple, for example, for the Aten, the solar deity of Akhenaten, and that this may have become an integral part of funerary custom, at least in the Amarna Age. So it's very interesting to see those reefs in. The details, especially the seemingly conspicuous details, are sometimes really interesting. How did Tutankhamen get to wear these fresh olive leaves in his burial? I could talk about all of that stuff regarding olive oil for hours on end. We actually have done a podcast on the origins of olive oil, which explores that in the Levant and so on.

But if we go back to Mycenae, we've kind of looked at the various bits of art and architecture from these artifacts in the shaft graves to the tholos tombs to the palace and the walls themselves. Lastly, as we do get to the end of the Bronze Age, so roughly the end of the second millennium BC, roughly around that time, isn't it? What do we think happens to Mycenae?

Well, this is the million-dollar question, really. So around 1200, slightly after 1200, we see that most of the palaces are destroyed and or abandoned. And the same goes to some extent for Mycenae, in that there clearly is a destruction, the palace is destroyed. There still is occupation. So throughout the 12th century, it certainly remained the center of importance. I think ideologically speaking, to some extent as well, this was clearly the place where the old kings used to live.

But nearby Tyriens, for example, where we have a similar destruction, clearly becomes the sort of principal center at that time in the area. Its population increases significantly, at least in the earlier phases of the 12th century. And there's even an attempt to sort of reconstruct a smaller, but at the same spot, a smaller palace on top of the citadel at Tyriens, not at Mycenae, so that's quite interesting.

But say around 1100, so the end of the 12th century, things clearly take a turn for the worse. And many of these centers are finally abandoned. Not necessarily by force. It's quite clear that people just move away. And we really don't know what happened. So there are later traditions, of course, the coming of the Dorians, another Greek tribe that sort of kick out the Mycenaean lords.

Maybe population movement played a role. Klein has written an excellent book about this, sort of summarizing a number or synthesizing rather a number of possibilities. Think of droughts, climate change. We know from texts from Hittite Anatolia and from the Egyptians that there was a drought in Anatolia and famine as a result. Things like that may have triggered the desertion of a number of these places as well.

But also think of, again, military problems. So, for example, the landscape of Greece, you see that throughout its history, does not necessarily lend itself very easily to unification. So if we have, for example, an overlord at Mycenae governing a number of his vassals in these different sites, it's quite conceivable that most of these at some point didn't really like to have an overlord. So you could well imagine, and later legends really seem to hit at this, that you had a lot of infighting as well, dynastic feuds, things like that.

So that may have spelled a combination of all of those things, may well have spelled the end of the Mycenaean era. And then it really becomes legend. And then you get the so-called Greek Dark Ages, don't you, after that? The so-called, yeah. The so-called, exactly, a bit controversial in its own right. Like almost when anyone says Dark Ages for any period of history. Well, yeah. Literacy, for example, disappears for some time, although there is now some really interesting research that suggests that the alphabet, for example, may have actually emerged later.

or may have been adopted much earlier than previously thought. But yeah, on the whole, there's a clear decline in terms of social differentiation and wealth in general. Well, Jor, this has been absolutely brilliant. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thanks very much for having me and hope to see you soon again.

Well, there you go. There was Dr. Joret Kelder talking all things Mycenae, this great bastion of Bronze Age Greece. Thank you for listening to this episode. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us.

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