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Mycenae

Accepted12/12HighMainland GreeceHomeric name(s): Μυκῆναι · Μυκήνη

Agamemnon's city, and the one Homeric capital that never had to be found: the citadel was visible above ground throughout antiquity and gives its name to the entire Bronze Age civilisation.

The Iliad calls Mycenae 'rich in gold' and makes it the seat of the coalition's high king. The site on the Argolid ridge answers that description with an emphasis the poem could hardly have invented: cyclopean fortifications, a monumental gate, shaft graves whose gold masks reached the Athens museum in 1876, and a palace burnt at the end of the Late Bronze Age.

The identification was never lost. Pausanias walked the ruins in the second century CE and named them; Schliemann dug them in 1876 believing he had found Agamemnon's grave, which he had not. What he had found was the centre of a civilisation that now takes its name from this hill.

What Mycenae gives the atlas is a baseline. It is what a Homeric place looks like when text, tradition and excavation agree completely — and it is the standard the contested identifications are scored against.

Identifications proposed

  • The citadel at Mycenae

    Proposed by: Pausanias 2.16; excavated by Schliemann (1876), then Wace

    Accepted12/12High

    A fortified Late Bronze Age citadel with cyclopean walls, the Lion Gate, shaft graves and a palace complex, occupied continuously since antiquity in memory as well as in fact — Pausanias visited the ruins in the second century CE and identified them as Agamemnon's city.

    37.7306, 22.7561· Site

    Confidence
    12/12 · High confidence
    Textual
    3
    Archaeological
    3
    Scholarly
    3
    Geographic
    3

Why this class

Accepted: the site was never in doubt, its Bronze Age material is overwhelming, and the surrounding geography — the Argive plain, the road to Corinth, the citadels at Tiryns and Argos — matches the political landscape the Catalogue of Ships describes.

What is disputed

Not whether the place is Mycenae, but what the place was. Whether a Mycenaean high king ever exercised the authority the Iliad gives Agamemnon, and how far the Linear B palace economy resembles the world of the poems, are open questions in Aegean archaeology.

Sources

  • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
  • Primary textHomer, Odyssey (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1919)
  • ArchaeologyHeinrich Schliemann, Mycenae: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns (1878)
  • ArchaeologyAlan J. B. Wace, Mycenae: An Archaeological History and Guide (Princeton, 1949)
  • Primary textPausanias, Description of Greece 2.16
  • ScholarshipUNESCO World Heritage List, Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns (inscribed 1999)