Mycenaean Burial and Commemoration

From about 1700 to 1050 BCE, communities in mainland Greece and the Aegean buried their dead in pits, hillside chambers and monumental circular tombs. At Mycenae in the Argolid, northeastern Peloponnese, Grave Circle B dates to about 1700 BCE; Grave Circle A and the first stone-built tholoi, or round tombs, followed around 1600. Burial could involve reopening a tomb, moving earlier bones, placing offerings and returning to a marked place of the dead. Funerary work also intersected with the household roles and institutions described in Daily Life in the Mycenaean World.

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Shaft graves at Mycenae

The deep shaft graves of Mycenae’s Grave Circles A and B were reached from above. A pit was cut into the ground, then covered with beams and stone slabs to create a small burial chamber below the surface. After the body was laid on its back, the roof was sealed with clay and earth. A stone marker, or stele, could stand above the filled shaft. Some graves were designed to receive more than one burial.

By about 1700 BCE, Grave Circle B’s stone enclosure and rich grave gifts marked the emergence of ruling and aristocratic families at Mycenae. Circle A developed around 1600 BCE and contained graves with gold ornaments, weapons and imported objects. A gold mask from Grave Circle A acquired the nickname “Mask of Agamemnon” after its excavator Heinrich Schliemann identified it with the epic king. The burials actually belong to Mycenae’s first generations of rulers in the sixteenth century BCE, centuries before the legendary Trojan War setting.

Chamber tombs and repeated burials

From the Late Helladic II period, roughly the fifteenth century BCE, rock-cut chamber tombs became the most widespread grave type. Builders cut a room into a hillside and approached it along a long passage called a dromos. The narrow doorway into the chamber is the stomion. Bodies were laid inside with vessels, weapons, seals or figurines, and mourners could place offerings in niches along the passage.

After a burial, stones blocked the doorway. People poured liquid offerings, or libations, in front of it, broke the vessels and filled the passage with earth. To reuse the tomb, they cleared the passage and removed the blocking stones. If the chamber had little space left, earlier bones could be shifted to its edges or placed in pits and wall niches; some tombs show other forms of handling, including burning older bones.

People added burials to chamber tombs over time. Archaeologists can compare body positions, distance from the doorway and layers in the entrance passage to distinguish burials made together from later interments, as Marya D’Alessio’s study explains. In one sampled tomb at Achaia, in the northern Peloponnese, selected bones were deliberately gathered and reburied without an associated primary burial (the body’s first interment).

Building monumental tholoi

A tholos was a round burial chamber built of stone and covered by a beehive-shaped vault. Builders stacked successive stone courses, each projecting farther inward until the upper opening closed. A long entrance passage led to the chamber, where a large horizontal stone, called a lintel, spanned and framed the doorway. The Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, probably built between about 1350 and 1200 BCE, is the largest example there; its later name comes from the mythical royal family rather than an identified occupant.

The cemetery at Dendra, near the palace center of Midea in the Argolid, shows the labor involved in a tholos. Its tomb, built around 1400 BCE, had an entrance passage nearly 18 metres long and a chamber about 7 metres across. A dome estimated at 7 metres high was made of fitted stone courses without mortar. Nearby, sixteen smaller chamber tombs were cut into soft rock, so a cemetery could combine different building methods and scales.

At Mycenae, Grave Circle A acquired another role after its burials. Around 1250 BCE, an expansion of the citadel enclosed the circle; it was refurbished and used for ancestral cults. Later inhabitants could therefore honor earlier dead within the defended citadel.

Local rites and change after the palaces

In the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, tomb use and reuse increased even as the building of new monumental graves declined. By the thirteenth century, new tholoi were rare; communities invested more in settlements, fortifications and roads. After the palaces fell in the late thirteenth and early twelfth centuries, people continued using existing tombs, and some later burials remained richly furnished. Cremation remained rare in Late Helladic IIIC, the post-palatial phase.

Regional customs also shaped the burial room. At Tanagra in Boeotia, central Greece, people placed the dead in a larnax (plural larnakes), a painted clay coffin, inside chamber tombs. Late Bronze Age larnakes show funeral processions and singers mourning the dead. The practice had Minoan precedents, but at Tanagra the painted coffins made those rites visible within a Mycenaean cemetery.