carefully studied all these books before and during his dig at Mycenae.
Before we go to Mycenae with Schliemann, though, two other visitors who preceded him should be noted, for their discoveries were potentially of the greatest importance in the progress of Mycenaean studies. In 1809 Thomas Burgon visited Mycenae ‘south of the southernmost angle of the wall of the acropolis’, and picked up some fragments of Mycenaean pottery which he published with a colour plate in 1847 as ‘An attempt to point out the Vases of Greece proper which belong to the Heroic and Homeric Age’. It was this simple but revolutionary article which Charles Newton had in mind when he visited Lechevalier’s Troy at Bunarbashi in 1853 with Frank Calvert ( see here ):
If this hill has ever been an acropolis we might expect to find those fragments of very early pottery which, as was first remarked by the late Mr Burgon, are so abundant on the Homeric sites of Mycenae and Tiryns. Of such pottery I saw not a vestige. …
Burgon and Newton’s observations lie at the root of all the present-day studies of the chronology of the Mycenaean world, and in fact when he saw Schliemann’s pottery from Mycenae Newton was also able to advance a rough absolute chronology for the Heroic Age at Mycenae, by the simple device of a comparison with similar pottery found in Egypt which couldbe dated to around 1375 BC. It was Schliemann’s discussions Newton which made him assert his dependence on pottery dating (as in Mycenae , 1880), though the implications of Newton’s conclusions for his Troy dig seem to have eluded him to the last.
It was natural that the Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus should have attracted the main attention of the nineteenth-century investigators just as they had done in Pausanias’ day. But of course it was the interior of the citadel, if anywhere, which was likely to provide answers about the early history of the place, and this had attracted little interest before Schliemann. Few travellers had even bothered to look around it, though Leake provided a rough map and described the overgrown slopes inside the gate, with traces of terraces and walling. Dodwell’s engraving suggests that the whole area was overgrown, with no major structures visible; likewise a watercolour done in 1834 shows that even the Lion Gate itself was completely choked with rubble and bushes, the bastions on either side ruined and covered with earth. This is what Schliemann had seen when in 1868 he first set eyes on the legendary stronghold of Agamemnon, the city ‘rich in gold’, as Homer had said. Schliemann’s guides from Corinth had never heard of Mycenae, but a farm boy from Charvati who took him to the site knew the citadel as ‘the fortress of Agamemnon’ and the Treasury of Atreus as ‘Agamemnon’s tomb’. For Schliemann this was virtual confirmation of the ancient myths. Eternal romantic that he was, his response to such stories was no different from that of the musicians and artists of his day, as for example the artist von Stackelberg, who actually went to Mycenae to paint:
I sat for hours in solemn solitude in front of the gigantic ruins, and while my pen reproduced their bold outlines I thought about the gigantic figures of the Greek heroes in this memorable place, the heroes who, murdering and murdered, were sacrificed to their inexorable fate.
Now in the summer of 1876 Schliemann was about to cap the imaginings of his fellow romantics. At Mycenae he would do no less than bring the Heroic Age to life.
THE MASK OF AGAMEMNON
The key to Schliemann’s incredible success at Mycenae lay in a passage in Pausanias’ book describing the tombs of the murdered Agamemnon and his companions as lying inside rather than outside the walls. Scholars had always assumed that Pausanias was referring to the great tholos tombs, including what we today call the Treasury of Atreus, and therefore that the walls of which he spoke were those of the outer circuit
Before we go to Mycenae with Schliemann, though, two other visitors who preceded him should be noted, for their discoveries were potentially of the greatest importance in the progress of Mycenaean studies. In 1809 Thomas Burgon visited Mycenae ‘south of the southernmost angle of the wall of the acropolis’, and picked up some fragments of Mycenaean pottery which he published with a colour plate in 1847 as ‘An attempt to point out the Vases of Greece proper which belong to the Heroic and Homeric Age’. It was this simple but revolutionary article which Charles Newton had in mind when he visited Lechevalier’s Troy at Bunarbashi in 1853 with Frank Calvert ( see here ):
If this hill has ever been an acropolis we might expect to find those fragments of very early pottery which, as was first remarked by the late Mr Burgon, are so abundant on the Homeric sites of Mycenae and Tiryns. Of such pottery I saw not a vestige. …
Burgon and Newton’s observations lie at the root of all the present-day studies of the chronology of the Mycenaean world, and in fact when he saw Schliemann’s pottery from Mycenae Newton was also able to advance a rough absolute chronology for the Heroic Age at Mycenae, by the simple device of a comparison with similar pottery found in Egypt which couldbe dated to around 1375 BC. It was Schliemann’s discussions Newton which made him assert his dependence on pottery dating (as in Mycenae , 1880), though the implications of Newton’s conclusions for his Troy dig seem to have eluded him to the last.
It was natural that the Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus should have attracted the main attention of the nineteenth-century investigators just as they had done in Pausanias’ day. But of course it was the interior of the citadel, if anywhere, which was likely to provide answers about the early history of the place, and this had attracted little interest before Schliemann. Few travellers had even bothered to look around it, though Leake provided a rough map and described the overgrown slopes inside the gate, with traces of terraces and walling. Dodwell’s engraving suggests that the whole area was overgrown, with no major structures visible; likewise a watercolour done in 1834 shows that even the Lion Gate itself was completely choked with rubble and bushes, the bastions on either side ruined and covered with earth. This is what Schliemann had seen when in 1868 he first set eyes on the legendary stronghold of Agamemnon, the city ‘rich in gold’, as Homer had said. Schliemann’s guides from Corinth had never heard of Mycenae, but a farm boy from Charvati who took him to the site knew the citadel as ‘the fortress of Agamemnon’ and the Treasury of Atreus as ‘Agamemnon’s tomb’. For Schliemann this was virtual confirmation of the ancient myths. Eternal romantic that he was, his response to such stories was no different from that of the musicians and artists of his day, as for example the artist von Stackelberg, who actually went to Mycenae to paint:
I sat for hours in solemn solitude in front of the gigantic ruins, and while my pen reproduced their bold outlines I thought about the gigantic figures of the Greek heroes in this memorable place, the heroes who, murdering and murdered, were sacrificed to their inexorable fate.
Now in the summer of 1876 Schliemann was about to cap the imaginings of his fellow romantics. At Mycenae he would do no less than bring the Heroic Age to life.
THE MASK OF AGAMEMNON
The key to Schliemann’s incredible success at Mycenae lay in a passage in Pausanias’ book describing the tombs of the murdered Agamemnon and his companions as lying inside rather than outside the walls. Scholars had always assumed that Pausanias was referring to the great tholos tombs, including what we today call the Treasury of Atreus, and therefore that the walls of which he spoke were those of the outer circuit
Similar Books
