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Tiryns

Accepted11/12HighMainland GreeceHomeric name(s): Τίρυνς

A Catalogue-of-Ships city whose Homeric epithet is a literal description of what survives: walls so massive that later Greeks assumed giants had built them.

Tiryns appears once in the Iliad, in Diomedes' Argive contingent, as 'Tiryns of the great walls'. The citadel stands eight kilometres from Mycenae, controlling the plain's access to the sea, and its Bronze Age fortifications are the most intact in the Argolid.

It is a small entry in the poems and a large one in the archaeology, which makes it a useful control case: the atlas is not measuring how important a place is in Homer, but how securely it can be located.

Identifications proposed

  • The citadel of Tiryns

    Proposed by: Continuous identification; excavated by Schliemann and Dörpfeld (1884–1885)

    Accepted11/12High

    Cyclopean walls up to eight metres thick, corbelled galleries and a palace with a megaron, on a low ridge commanding the Argive plain and its coast. Homer's single epithet for it — 'Tiryns of the great walls' — is the most economical accurate description of an archaeological site in either poem.

    37.5997, 22.7997· Site

    Confidence
    11/12 · High confidence
    Textual
    2
    Archaeological
    3
    Scholarly
    3
    Geographic
    3

Why this class

Accepted: an excavated citadel of unmistakable date, identified continuously since antiquity. Textual scores 2 only because the poem says almost nothing about it beyond the epithet.

What is disputed

Nothing about the location. The live questions are about function — how Tiryns related politically to Mycenae, and what the post-palatial reoccupation means for the end of the Bronze Age.

Sources