Mycenae: Alli B

Mycenae is in the Pelopennese region of Greece, about 90 km outside of Athens. It is the site of an ancient palace, where supposedly the famous ancient King Agamemnon called home. If you have read Homer's "Iliad" or seen Brad Pitt's fantastic feature film "Troy", you know that King Agamemnon is one of the leaders of the Trojan War. It was really cool to link the story of Agamemnon to a physical place, even if the story is not necessarily true.

I made a few observations about the actual structures that we saw at Mycenae. First of all, when you walk up the path to the palace, you see the famous Lion Gate. It is a large archway that you walk under, and across the top, there are two large lions engraved into the stone. There are also ruts in the path, where the wheels of chariots could wheel up to the gate, back in the day. It's definitely a structure that would make a good first impression for any visitors that the palace had.

After walking through the Lion Gate, you see what are called the circle graves. They are large stone walls in the shape of a circle, where the royalty of Mycenae were buried. The graves are right next to the palace, which kind of weirds me out, because I don't think I would want someone's grave in such close proximity to my house. In the 1800s an archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann (who also worked at the site of ancient Troy) excavated the circle graves. He found the remains of a body with a gold mask over it, and in his excitement exclaimed that he had found Agamemnon. However, modern archaeologists agree that the mask is from an earlier period from that which Agamemnon would have lived in. I feel like if I had been Schliemann, I too would have been caught up in the story behind Mycenae and probably would have bragged about finding Agamemnon's body.

The last observation I made about the palace of Mycenae is the lack of a remaining structure. The palace is now just a bunch of stones outlining what would have been rooms of the palace. It was really hard for me to envision what the palace would have looked like as a complete structure, from the outside and the inside. There were some parts of the palace that had tunnels carved right into the side of the mountain (I forgot to mention, but Mycenae is surrounded by mountains. It's very beautiful). I really liked going in the tunnels because it gave me a more concrete idea of what a part of the palace was like and I could imagine people using these tunnels in ancient times.

After we went to the palace we went to the site of another ancient tomb. The structure is called a tholos tomb (or "beehive" tomb), and it was carved into a mound. There is a long "entry hall" that is outside, with a very large door at the end of this walk way. When you enter the tomb, it is a large domed room, of quite large proportions. It reminded me of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, because of the great display of wealth and self-importance. The people buried in the tholos tombs were not your common man, but royalty and the wealthy. When someone was buried here, there were also personal belongings buried with them, to prepare them for the afterlife.