Prehistoric
Greek city in the Peloponnese, celebrated by Homer as "broad-streeted"
and "golden." According to legend, Mycenae was the capital
of Agamemnon, the Achaean king who sacked the city of Troy, and
it was set, as Homer says, "in a nook of Argos," with
a natural citadel formed by the ravines between the mountains
of Hagios Elias (Ayios Ilias) and Zara, and furnished with a fine
perennial spring named Perseia after Perseus, the legendary founder
of Mycenae. It is the chief Late Bronze Age site in mainland Greece.
Systematic excavation of the site began in 1840, but the most
celebrated discoveries there were those of Heinrich Schliemann.
(For the context of Mycenae in the prehistory of the Aegean area,
The term "Mycenaean" is often used in reference to the
Late Bronze Age of mainland Greece in general and of the islands
except Crete.There was a settlement at Mycenae in the Early Bronze
Age, but all structures of that or of the succeeding Middle Bronze
Age have, with insignificant exceptions, been swept away by later
buildings.
The existing palace must have been reconstructed in the 14th century
BC. The whole area is studded with tombs that have yielded many
art objects and artifacts. From the Lion Gate at the entrance
to Mycenae's citadel, a graded road 3.6 m wide, leads to a ramp
supported by a five-terrace wall and thence to the southwestern
entrance of the palace. The latter is composed of two main blocks,
one originally covering the top of the hill but largely destroyed
on the erection of the Hellenistic temple, the other occupying
the lower terrace to the south banked up artificially on its western
edge. The two blocks were separated by two parallel east-west
corridors with storerooms opening off them. The existence of a
palace shrine on the upper terrace seems implied by discoveries
of a magnificent ivory group consisting of two goddesses and an
infant god with fragments of painted tripod altars and other objects.
At the southwestern corner of the later palace, the west lobby
led to the grand staircase of 22 steps, a landing, and another
17 or 18 steps culminating in a small forecourt that afforded
entrance to the great court and to a square room immediately to
the north of it. There an oblong area with raised plaster border
has been interpreted by some scholars as the base for a throne
where the king sat in audience. Other scholars, however, have
regarded it as a hearth and the room as a guest chamber; the throne
might then have stood on the right of the megaron (great central
hall), a part that has now disappeared. Both the porch and the
main portion of the megaron had floors of painted stucco with
borders of gypsum slabs and with frescoes on the walls, one apparently
representing a battle in front of a citadel. In the centre was
a round plaster hearth enclosed by four wooden columns, possibly
implying the existence of a clerestory. The 10 plaster layers
of the hearth and 4 of the floor suggest that this hall was in
use for a considerable time. The roof was probably flat. East
of the corridor lay a series of rooms, the most interesting known
from its decoration as "the room of the curtain frescoes."
Within the citadel were various houses of retainers. The most
imposing, "the house of the columns," rose to three
stories in height. South of the grave circle lie the ruins of
the "ramp house," the "south house," and the
"house of Tsountas." Another building, known as "the
granary," from the carbonized barley, wheat, and vetches
found in its basement, was erected in the 13th century BC between
the Cyclopean citadel wall and one of the grave circles and continued
in use up to the destruction of the city by fire about 1100 BC.
The Late Mycenaean period (1400-1100 BC) was one of great prosperity
in the Peloponnese. After the destruction of Knossos, on Minoan
Crete, Mycenae became the dominant power in the Aegean, where
its fleet must have controlled the nearer seas and colonized the
Cyclades, Crete, Cyprus, the Dodecanese, northern Greece and Macedonia,
western Asia Minor, Sicily, and some sites in Italy. Mycenaean
rather than Minoan goods are found in the markets of Egypt, Syria,
and Palestine. Mycenaean raiders harried the coasts of the Egyptians
and the Hittites, and at a date traditionally supposed to be 1180,
but by some scholars now estimated at about 1250 BC, Agamemnon
and his followers sacked the great city of Troy. In the 16th century
BC, Mycenaean art was temporarily dominated by the influences
of Minoan art. Cretan artists must have emigrated to the mainland,
and local varieties of all the Minoan arts arose at Mycenae. Minoan
naturalism and exuberance were tempered by Greek formality and
sense of balance, which were already visible in Middle Helladic
painted wares and were later to culminate in the splendid Geometric
pottery of the Dipylon cemetery at Athens. (see also Index: Minoan
civilization ) Until 1950 Mycenaean literacy was attested only
by a few symbols painted on vases; but in 1952 the excavation
of "the house of the oil merchant" and "the house
of the wine merchant" outside the walls disclosed a number
of tablets in the Linear B script first identified at Knossos
and later interpreted by the English architect and cryptographer
Michael Ventris to be an earlier form of the Greek language. Mycenae
was burned and destroyed perhaps by invading Dorians about 1100
BC, but the outer city was not deserted; graves of the Proto-Geometric
and Geometric periods have been excavated.
Mycenae evidently continued to exist as a small city-state, and
the walls were not pulled down. Early in the 6th century BC a
temple, from which one fine relief survives, was erected; in 480
Mycenae sent 400 men to fight against the Persians at Thermopylae,
and its men were at Plataea in 479. In 470, however, its aggressive
neighbour Argos, which had been neutral in the Persian war, took
an ignoble revenge by besieging Mycenae and in 468 destroyed it.
In the Hellenistic period Mycenae revived, and a new temple was
built on the crown of the acropolis; in 235 BC the Argive tyrant
Aristippus was killed there, and the city wall repaired. Nabis
of Sparta carried off some of the young men about 195 BC, and
an inscription of 194 refers to their detention. A few Roman objects
have been found, but, when Greek traveler and geographer Pausanias
visited the site about AD 160, he found it in ruins.
|
