Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns
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How it came to be
Mycenae and Tiryns, in the Argolid of the northeast Peloponnese, are the ruins of the two leading cities of the Mycenaean civilisation, which dominated the eastern Mediterranean from the 15th to the 12th century BC. At Mycenae, rulers were buried in Grave Circle A in the 16th century BC, the Cyclopean walls were rebuilt around 1350 BC, and the Lion Gate was added around 1250 BC.
The citadel of Tiryns, about 20 km away, was completed at the end of the 13th century BC inside a ring of massive walls about 750 m around. Homer called it mighty-walled Tiryns. Both palaces fell in the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC, and Argos captured and destroyed the two towns in 468 BC.
In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann dug Grave Circle A at Mycenae and found the gold death mask he linked to Agamemnon, though it is more than 300 years older than the Trojan War. The sites have also yielded Linear B tablets, among the earliest written Greek, and were listed by UNESCO in 1999.
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