The palaces of Minoan Crete, with their light-wells and downward-tapering columns, and the citadels of Mycenaean Greece: cyclopean walls, the Lion Gate, the megaron with its hearth, and corbelled beehive tombs.
On Crete, from about 1900 BC, the Minoans built palaces at Knossos, Phaistos, Malia and Zakros: great agglomerations of rooms, several storeys high, grouped round a rectangular central court. They were unfortified and full of light. Light-wells brought sun and air deep into the building; stairs turned round open wells; walls of rubble and timber frames were plastered and painted with frescoes of the sea, flowers, bull-leaping and processions. Their columns, of wood on stone bases, tapered downward and carried a round cushion capital, a form known from frescoes, models and the restorations at Knossos.
On the mainland the Mycenaeans (c. 1600–1100 BC) adopted much of Minoan art but built for war. Their citadels at Mycenae, Tiryns and Gla were ringed with cyclopean walls of enormous rough blocks; later Greeks believed only giants could have lifted them. At the Lion Gate of Mycenae (c. 1250 BC) a twenty-tonne lintel is relieved by a triangle, filled with the oldest monumental sculpture in Europe: two lions flanking a Minoan column.
At the heart of each palace stood the megaron: a porch with two columns between the ends of the side walls, a vestibule, and a great hall with a round hearth ringed by four columns, the throne against one wall. The megaron of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, with its painted floor and hearth, is the best preserved. Its axial plan and columned porch are generally seen as the root of the Greek temple.
The Mycenaeans buried their kings in tholos tombs: circular chambers roofed by corbelled domes, entered by a long passage (the dromos) and covered by earth mounds. The greatest, the so-called Treasury of Atreus (c. 1250 BC), is 14.5 m in diameter and 13.2 m high, built of 33 courses of cut conglomerate, with a doorway lintel of some 120 tonnes. It remained the largest span in the world for well over a thousand years.
The Bronze Age world collapsed around 1200–1100 BC. When monumental building resumed in Greece, centuries later, the palaces were forgotten, but the megaron plan, the column in antis and the gift for exact stonework survived to shape the Greek temple.