The fortified hill of the Mycenaean kings: a circuit of Cyclopean walls entered by the Lion Gate, the grave circle of the ancestors inside it, the palace megaron on the summit, and outside the walls a straggling lower town and the great tholos tombs beside the roads.
Mycenae left no building texts, but Pausanias walked through its ruins in the second century AD and recorded what he was shown: walls built by the Cyclopes, a gate with lions standing over it, the spring Perseia, underground treasuries of Atreus and his sons, and graves (Agamemnon’s inside the walls, and Clytemnestra’s and Aegisthus’s a little way outside, since they were thought unworthy to lie within). Schliemann dug here with Pausanias in his hand in 1876; the rules of the place are read from his text and from a century and a half of excavation since.
In the thirteenth century BC the citadel was walled with huge, roughly shaped blocks, and the Lion Gate was set back in a court with a bastion on the right of the approach. Just inside it the wall was swung out to enclose the old shaft graves in a ring of slabs; a ramp climbed past them to the palace on the summit terraces, whose megaron (porch, vestibule, and a hall with four columns round a hearth) faced west over its court. Late in the century the wall was extended again to bring a hidden stair to an underground cistern within the defences.
Outside the walls the houses of the lower town stood on terraces along the roads, and the great tholos tombs were dug into the slopes beside them. The hill is shown in three stepped terraces; the house positions of the lower town, the upper storeys and the roofs are restored. Click a building for its rule and its source.