Who ruled Mycenae?

Mycenae is a Bronze Age citadel on a hill in the north-eastern corner of the Argive plain in the Peloponnese, Greece, near the village of Mykines and about 11 kilometres north of Argos. In the second millennium BC it was one of the most powerful centres of the Greek world, so important that the whole civilisation of the period from about 1600 to 1100 BC is called Mycenaean. In Greek legend it was the kingdom of Agamemnon, and its massive walls, Lion Gate and beehive tombs are among the best-known monuments of early Greece.

There are faint traces of people on the hill from the Early Neolithic, around 5000 BC, and it was occupied through the Early Bronze Age. The population grew considerably in the Middle Bronze Age, when the first circuit wall partly enclosed the summit. Two royal cemeteries mark Mycenae's rise. Grave Circle B, dated to roughly 1650 to 1550 BC, held cist and shaft graves with rich offerings, while Grave Circle A, from the sixteenth century BC, contained even richer burials of warrior chiefs and their families, with inlaid weapons, silver vessels and a famous gold mask. Objects of Cretan type show strong Minoan influence at this stage.

Mycenae became a major power between about 1550 and 1450 BC. After Minoan dominance in the Aegean ended around 1450, Mycenaeans occupied Knossos on Crete, and in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries Mycenae is believed to have been the leading centre of Aegean civilisation. Its influence probably reached Crete, Pylos, Athens and Thebes. Egyptian inscriptions of Amenhotep III appear to name the city, and a scarab of his queen Tiye was found in a shrine in the citadel.

Around 1350 BC the fortifications were rebuilt in the style later called Cyclopean, because the blocks seemed too large for anyone but the mythical one-eyed giants to have moved; some weighed well over 20 tonnes. Within them stood a palace built around a megaron, a throne room with a central hearth. Around 1250 BC the walls were extended to take in Grave Circle A, and the main entrance was rebuilt as the Lion Gate. The great tholos tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus belongs to the same century. At its height the citadel and lower town covered about 32 hectares and, by one estimate, held some 30,000 people.

Scholars traditionally saw the Mycenaean palaces as independent states, but some now argue that Mycenae ruled a much larger territory than its neighbours, possibly including Tiryns, and that much of Greece may have been loosely united under one great king.

Mycenae was among the many Aegean centres destroyed in the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC. No one knows why; enemy attack, internal conflict and earthquakes have all been proposed. Unlike many sites it was partly rebuilt, though no longer as the seat of a literate palace administration, and it regained some wealth before burning again, with the final destruction often placed around 1150 BC. Afterwards only a small population remained.

In the Archaic period a temple of Hera stood on the summit, and Mycenaean soldiers fought at Thermopylae and Plataea in the Greco-Persian Wars. In 468 BC the neighbouring city of Argos captured Mycenae, expelled its inhabitants and pulled down its fortifications. A small Hellenistic settlement with a theatre followed before the site was abandoned. By the second century AD, when Pausanias described the Lion Gate, the ruins were already a destination for visitors.

Greek myth said Perseus founded Mycenae and that it later passed to the house of Atreus, whose king Agamemnon led the Greeks against Troy and was murdered on his return by his wife Clytemnestra. These stories, retold in the Oresteia and other tragedies, cannot be confirmed as history.

The site was forgotten in the Middle Ages and correctly identified again in 1700 by the Venetian engineer Francesco Vandeyk, using Pausanias's account. In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann, seeking Agamemnon's grave, excavated Grave Circle A and found a gold mask he named the Mask of Agamemnon; it is now dated centuries before any likely Trojan War. Later excavations were led by Christos Tsountas, by Alan Wace of the British School at Athens and by Greek archaeologists; Grave Circle B came to light in 1951. Mycenae and nearby Tiryns were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.