User:UndercoverClassicist/Mycenae

Religion

Main article: Mycenaean religion

Modern history and excavation

The site of Mycenae appears to have been abandoned after its short-lived Hellenistic resettlement. By the time of Pausanias' visit in the second century CE, he described the site as a 'ruin', though noted that parts of the walls and the Lion Gate could still be seen. Grave Circle A, meanwhile, was already buried in prehistoric times, and is unlikely to have been visible to Pausanias. The site may still have been visible in the 5th century CE, when it was correctly located on the Roman map known as the Tabula Peutingeriana, but the location seems to have been forgotten during the medieval period: it was generally misplaced on fifteenth-century maps, and Cyriac of Ancona, who believed he visited the site in 1447/1448, had actually seen the nearby fort of Katsingri. Similarly, modern scholarship has disproved the claims of two sixteenth-century travellers to have visited the site: André de Monceaux, who claimed to have visited the site in 1669, and the French military officer Nicola Mirabel, who believed that he had done so in 1691.

Early archaeological work (1700–1876)

See also: Treasury of Atreus § Excavations

In 1700, the Venetian engineer Francesco Vandeyk made the first known correct identification of Mycenae of modern times while surveying the Peloponnese (known to the Venetians as the 'Morea') under the orders of Francesco Grimani, Provveditore of the Venetian armies occupying the region. Vandeyk partially dismantled the debris that was then obscuring the Lion Gate, and identified the tomb now known as the 'Treasury of Atreus', even conjecturing that it was the tomb of a king of Mycenae. During the 18th century, Mycenae was visited only infrequently by tourists, such as the Frenchman Claude-Louis Fourmont, who visited Mycenae in 1729–1730 and drew parts of the walls and gates. From 1796, however, Napoleon's invasion of Italy encouraged members of the Society of Dilettanti, whose 'Grand Tour' normally took place in Italy, to find alternative destinations, and members of the society began to include Mycenae on their itineraries: seeing it, in the words of Cathy Gere, as 'the ultimate Romantic ruin.'

In the early 19th century, local tradition held that the Treasury of Atreus had been once explored by the agha of the nearby village of Karvati, who took from it a bronze lamp. By this period, more of Mycenae's monuments were visible and known to European visitors. In 1802, the British aristocrat Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin visited Mycenae looking for antiquities that might be taken back to Britain. While he had originally sought to remove the sculpted relief of the Lion Gate, it proved too large to lift or transport, and so Elgin asked the voivode of Nafplio to clear the Treasury of Atreus, from which he removed fragments of pottery vases, ornamental stonework and a marble vase, as well as parts of its sculptural decoration. In June 1810, Veli Pasha, the Ottoman Pasha of the Morea, excavated the tomb, clearing most of the entrance, and entered the chamber with ladders; according to Heinrich Schliemann's later publication of his own excavations at Mycenae, he discovered 'bones covered with gold', as well as gemstones and other gold and silver objects. Veli Pasha removed four large fragments of the semi-engaged columns beside the doorway, some of which he gave as a gift to Howe Browne, 2nd Marquess of Sligo, who visited him shortly after the excavations.

In 1834, the site was surveyed and mapped by French troops. In 1841, Kyriakos Pittakis, working on behalf of the Archaeological Society of Athens, cleared the approach to the Lion Gate and made a tentative exploration of the Tomb of Clytemnestra.

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