Mycenae, the Lion Gate and the Mask That Isn’t Agamemnon’s

The war that supposedly destroyed Troy was launched, according to the tradition, from a citadel on a rocky hill in the northeast Peloponnese. Mycenae was real, it was rich, and it was powerful enough to give its name to an entire civilisation. Whether Agamemnon existed is another matter, but the palace culture Homer describes is not invented: it is dug up, catalogued and on display, and you can walk through its front gate.

What Mycenae Actually Was

Mycenaean Greece was the dominant power of the Late Bronze Age Aegean, roughly 1600 to 1100 BC, and Mycenae was its most famous centre. This was a literate, bureaucratic, heavily fortified society: palaces with archives, workshops, chariots, and a warrior aristocracy buried with extraordinary quantities of gold.

Two things anchor it in fact rather than legend:

• Linear B. The palace archives were written on clay tablets in a script deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris, who showed, against expectation, that the language was an early form of Greek. The tablets are inventories, not literature, but they name gods still worshipped centuries later and record a palace economy of remarkable complexity.
• The collapse. Around 1200–1100 BC the Mycenaean palaces were destroyed or abandoned in a wider systems failure across the eastern Mediterranean. Writing was lost. What followed is conventionally called the Greek Dark Age, and Homer, composing perhaps four centuries later, was describing a world that had already vanished.

The Lion Gate, the Shaft Graves and the Mask

• The Lion Gate is the entrance and the single most recognisable piece of Bronze Age architecture in Europe: two lionesses, or possibly griffins, flanking a column above a monolithic lintel, in place since roughly 1250 BC. It is the oldest monumental sculpture surviving in Europe.
• The Cyclopean walls are built from blocks so large that later Greeks assumed the Cyclopes had done the work, which is where the name comes from.
• Grave Circle A, just inside the gate, is where Schliemann dug in 1876 and found shaft graves containing gold death masks, weapons, and jewellery of astonishing quality. Crucially, these burials date to around 1600 BC, some three to four centuries before any plausible Trojan War.
• The “Mask of Agamemnon” is the famous one, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens rather than at the site. Schliemann is popularly said to have telegraphed that he had gazed upon the face of Agamemnon. He almost certainly did not send that line, and the mask is far too early to be Agamemnon’s under any reading. The name stuck anyway.
• The Treasury of Atreus, a short distance downhill, is the finest surviving tholos tomb: a corbelled beehive chamber whose dome was the largest unsupported span anywhere in the world for about a thousand years, until the Pantheon. It is included on the site ticket and a great many visitors skip it, which is a mistake.

Visiting: What It Costs and When to Go

• The ticket is about €20 and covers the citadel, the museum and the Treasury of Atreus, valid for one entry to each and usable the day after first entry.
• Hours run roughly 8:00–20:00 in high summer, 8:00–19:00 in April, and drop to about 8:30–15:30 in winter. Check before travelling, as the Greek ministry adjusts these seasonally.
• Allow 1.5 to 2 hours for the citadel and museum, plus 20 minutes for the Treasury of Atreus.
• Go at opening. The coach groups arrive from Athens mid-morning, the hill is entirely unshaded, and the site is punishing by midday in summer.
• Wear real shoes. The citadel is steep, uneven and slippery where the rock has been polished by three thousand years of feet.
• Don’t miss the cistern at the far end, a stepped passage running down into the dark beneath the walls. Bring a phone torch.

Mycenae sits about 90 minutes from Athens by road and pairs naturally with Nafplio, Epidaurus and Tiryns. It was inscribed by UNESCO in 1999 together with Tiryns.

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Where to Stay

Nafplio, about 25 minutes away, is the obvious base and one of the prettiest towns in Greece.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns
• Hellenic Ministry of Culture — Mycenae site record