The Buildings of the Mycenaeans
The history of man in Greece goes far back in time. Perhaps as early as 6000 B., there were
Neolithic settlements. Sometime around 2500 B.C. bronze began to be used by the people living there,
beginning a period of history called the Early Helladic or Early Bronze Age. The Early Helladic people
refined their techniques in metalwork, particularly in gold, and raised cities girded with walls and
towers. Through trade with the Cretans and others in the Aegean they prospered. Then disaster overcame
them.
Sometime around 2000 B.C. some Indo-European tribes swept down on the Greek peninsula,
conquering the Early Helladic people and destroying their cities. Gradually the Mycenaean civilization
developed.
The period from the Mycenaean conquest to about 1600 B.C. is known as the Middle Helladic or
Middle Bronze Age in Greece. From about 1600 to 1100 B.C. a remarkable civilization developed in the
period known as the Late Helladic or Late Bronze Age. This civilization spread throughout Greece,
around the Aegean westward to Sicily and Italy, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. A Mycenaean
dagger has been found in Cornwall, on the west coast of England, and there is a carving of one of these
daggers on the ancient monument at Stonehenge, which is located in southern England.
According to existing evidence, it appears that the Mycenaeans spoke the earliest form of what
we know as Greek. In 1939, Carl Blegen, an American archaeologist, found 600 clay tablets in a palace
at Pylos, a Mycenaean city, on the southwestern coast of Greece. These tablets were written in a script
called Linear B, a script which had earlier been discovered on tablets in the Cretan city of Knossos by an
Englishman, Sir Arthur Evans. In 1953 two Englishmen, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, published
a work identifying the script as old Greek. Tablets bearing this same script have since turned up in other
parts of Greece.
About 1100 B.C. the Mycenaeans were overcome by invaders who came by land and possibly
also by sea. Historians usually refer to these invaders as Dorians, but their identity is not yet certain. It is
known, however, that these new Greeks built a new civilization on the remains of the old, a civilization
which continues to have its impact.
The following selection describes some of the accomplishments of the Mycenaeans.*
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INQUIRY: What conclusions might you draw about the Mycenaean’s from their architecture?
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This growing civilization was truly Mycenaean by the middle of the sixteenth century
B.C. By then great wealth existed in Greece, and soon after, if not already, palaces and walled
citadels rose above towns which had long been settled in important strategic and commercial
locations. In the succeeding four hundred years, scores of small and large towns flourished in
even the remotest parts of Greece. The remains of many towns show that major works of
architecture and large-scale engineering projects were conceived and carried to completion. The
later Greeks, the Hellenes, were so staggered by the traces of Mycenaean masonry that they
assumed that the walls must have been built by semi-divine giants, the Cyclopes, and the term
Cyclopaean survives today to denote the Mycenaean method of building walls with monumental
blocks of stone. These walls, parts of which still stand, point to the centers of power all through
Greece. At Mycenae, at nearby Tiryns, at Pylos on the west coast of the Peloponnesus, at Thebes
in Boeotia, and at Lolkos in Thessaly the Mycenaeans settled and built communities. It seems,
from what we know today, that the Mycenaeans established towns in all the places which were to
be significant for one reason or another in the later classical period, and in many others besides.
In Mycenaean times Greece was probably as heavily settled and prosperous as it ever was to be
again, and the general level of culture may have been far higher than the silent stones would ever
lead us to assume.
The palaces were decorated by magnificent frescoes of great artistic and technical
quality…
The Mycenaean builder's skills and his mastery of engineering appear again and again in
the structures which still stand. When the architects turned to the construction of tombs, they
showed their genius in the creation of structures as brilliant as they are different from palaces.
The tholos tomb, a large round chamber with a domed roof, is almost a hallmark of Mycenaean
civilization. The so-called Treasury of Atreus, an underground tomb outside the citadel of
Mycenae and below the lower town, exemplifies the Mycenaean mastery of complex problems in
structural engineering. A cement-paved approach, flanked by walls lined with huge well-cut
blocks of stones, runs directly into the tomb. A door, capped by an enormous lintel weighing
over a hundred tons, opens into the depths of the hill. Above the door, shadowed in black, an
open triangular arch relieves the weight of stone pressing down upon it. A short corridor leads to
the main chamber, a circular room almost fifty feet in diameter. Its walls, successive courses of
smoothly cut stone, rise almost forty-five feet, curving with mathematical exactness to finish in a
perfect dome.
This masterpiece of precision, built about 1330 B.C., reveals perhaps more clearly than
any other single structure the technical accomplishment of the Mycenaean builder. He was no
mere piler of stones, but an engineer and architect in every sense of the terms. His control of
weight and stress in the construction of the great dome shows a technical mastery which would
have done credit even to the Romans. Nor was this tomb an accidental flash of genius. Although
it is the largest tomb of its type, other tholos tombs dot the mainland of Greece. The Mycenaeans
were capable of reproducing this complex structure again and again, and it might well be supposed that Mycenaean architects were specialists whose professional lives were devoted to
building and to training technicians for the future.
*Alan E Samuel, THE MYCENEANS IN HISTORY, © 1966. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey.