Mycenaean Architecture and Building Methods

Archaeologists use “Mycenaean” for the Late Bronze Age material culture of central and southern mainland Greece, with related objects and influences extending across the Aegean, roughly 1700–1050 BCE. The Argolid, where Mycenae lies, is in the northeastern Peloponnese of Greece. The great palaces at Pylos, Mycenae and Tiryns took shape mainly in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, when rulers and palace administrations coordinated construction on a large scale. Their builders used stone, earth, timber and plaster, combining them differently from site to site.

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Halls and routes through palaces

A megaron was a formal hall unit arranged as a porch, an entrance room or vestibule, and a larger main room. At thirteenth-century Tiryns, the palace stood on the upper citadel. Its main court opened onto the great megaron: visitors crossed the porch and vestibule before entering the principal room. Four wooden columns stood around a central hearth, and a throne stood against the east wall on a low decorated base.

At Pylos, in western Messenia, the central megaron similarly combined a porch, vestibule and main hall. Its circular hearth sat between four wooden columns. The hearth is secure in the archaeological plan; the throne’s position is reconstructed rather than preserved. The palace, however, comprised several connected buildings and wings. The central block included rooms around a court, stairs, storerooms and a two-room archive where tablets in Linear B, a syllabic script used to write an early form of Greek, recorded goods and people. An earlier building on the southwest side had its own pillared hall and bath; the northeastern building contained workshops and stores. Corridors and stairs connected these areas; the central and southwestern buildings rose to a second floor. The overall complex joined ceremonial rooms to the spaces where administrators stored supplies, recorded them and organized skilled work.

Gla, in Boeotia in central Greece, offers a different arrangement. Archaeologist Guy Middleton describes a pillared hall and a large L-shaped residential building whose northwest corner contained a megaron-like unit; Gla had no classic central megaron. Gla also stood on a low limestone island within the Kopais basin, a landscape reshaped by canals, dykes and reservoirs.

Materials and the work of building

Stone foundations and thresholds supported wooden columns, doorframes and roof structures. Pylos used substantial amounts of timber in its pillars, partitions and roofs, while plaster covered many interior walls and floors. Because wood and mudbrick disappear more readily than stone, excavated foundations do not preserve every upper storey or the finished appearance of the rooms. At Mycenae, builders also shaped the palace site itself: they cut and leveled terraces into the slope, then set buildings and courts on separate levels linked by corridors, stairs and a monumental ramp.

A Linear B tablet from Pylos gives a rare view of the people who made such buildings. It records food allocations for twenty wall-builders, five sawyers and one pantekton, an “all-builder.” Archaeologist Dimitri Nakassis reads the wall-builders as masons and the sawyers as workers who cut beams and other wooden elements, such as clamps, dowels and doorjambs. The lone pantekton received a larger daily allocation; Nakassis suggests he may have supervised or led the work. At Pylos in Late Helladic IIIB, a phase of the later Mycenaean palatial period, many walls were built by pouring a mortar of rubble, mud and lime into a heavy timber framework, usually removed once the material set. Sawyers therefore prepared structural pieces while masons arranged walls, and a large work crew needed coordination as well as materials.

Building style also changed over time and place. Mycenae’s citadel walls were extended in stages: construction began around 1350 BCE, a west-and-south addition followed about a century later, and after a destruction around 1200 BCE the wall was extended northeast to include an underground well. The initial fortification used Cyclopean masonry: huge limestone blocks, roughly shaped or left irregular, wedged together with small stones and yellow clay. Later work at the Lion Gate used large conglomerate blocks dressed with a hammer and placed in more regular courses. The gate, built about 1250 BCE, consists of a threshold, two side posts and a lintel. Above it, a relieving triangle left an opening over the lintel, directing the weight of the masonry above toward the sides of the doorway. These phases show builders adapting both the material and the fit of masonry to different parts of the same citadel.

Corbelled vaults, tombs and passages

Corbelling forms a roof or arch by placing each successive stone course farther inward than the one below, gradually narrowing the opening until it can be closed. At Tiryns, galleries built in the late thirteenth century used inward-projecting courses to form a pointed roof. The same principle produced large circular burial chambers called tholoi, approached along a passage cut into the slope. At Mycenae, tholoi chart a long building history: the tomb conventionally called the Tomb of Aegisthos dates to about 1500 BCE, the Tomb of the Lions to about 1350 BCE, and the Treasury of Atreus to about 1250 BCE. Aegisthos and Atreus are traditional names drawn from myth, not identified occupants of these Bronze Age tombs. The Treasury’s chamber is about 14.6 metres across and was formed from 33 horizontal rings of carefully fitted stone blocks, each ring slightly smaller than the one below it. Its grand entrance had a massive lintel and a relieving triangle above it.

Roads across the Argolid

Roads in the Argolid, the northeastern Peloponnese of Greece, crossed ravines on stone bridges and carried runoff through culverts beneath the roadbed. On one studied route near Mycenae, the roadbed had a foundation of stone and earth, a packed layer of earth and small stones, and a surface of compacted earth, pebbles and sand. The road surface continued over bridges and culverts, while drain channels under the road carried hillside runoff into the valley.

Shaping water and settlements

In the Kopais basin near Thebes and Orchomenos in central Greece, Mycenaean engineers used canals, dykes and artificial reservoirs to control water. The dykes held back water flowing in from surrounding streams, while a canal carried lake water toward natural and cut drainage openings in the limestone, through which it flowed underground toward the Euboean Gulf. That system drained parts of the shallow basin for cultivation and stored water against flooding. Near Tiryns, a thirteenth-century BCE earthen dam was lined with large stones at its ends. The Manesis torrent flowed toward Tiryns and caused floods; a diversion channel carried its rainwater south of Profitis Ilias into another stream, away from the citadel and lower settlement.

After palace administration ended around 1200 BCE, postpalatial communities continued to occupy and rebuild at Mycenae. Parts of the damaged complex were repaired or rebuilt before the palace was finally abandoned late in the twelfth century.

For the wider setting, see Mycenaean Culture and Arts.