Some Minority Viewsrather than true shaft graves, and which contained no grave
goods other than pottery) are Middle Helladic and seem to date
from shortly before 1600 B.C. 15
The wealthy and warlike lords who were buried in the shaft
graves of both circles have usually been identified as Greeks.
Schliemann regarded the occupants of his circle as Agamemnon
and his friends, hastily though sumptuously buried by Aegis-
theus. Evans, it is true, decided that the people buried in Cir-
cle A were Minoans, since many of the grave gifts were either
manufactured or inspired by Cretan craftsmen. Since Evans's
time, however, it has become quite clear that Mycenae was
ruled by Greeks during its heyday. Because there is no evidence
that the Shaft Grave Dynasty ended by violence (and in fact the
later lords of Mycenae treated Grave Circle A as hallowed
ground), it is reasonable to conclude that the people buried in
the shaft graves were indeed Greeks.
What suggests that they might have been newcomers to
Greece, freshly arrived from the land of the PIE speakers, is the
fact that the deposits found in the shaft graves seem to be with-
out precedent at Mycenae or anywhere else in Greece. The
more archaeologists have learned about the Middle Helladic
period, the more convinced some observers have become that
no evolution or gradual progress led up to the bellicose opu-
lence of the Shaft Grave Dynasty. 16 They argue instead, as
- O.T.P.K. Dickinson, The Origins of Mycenaean Civilisation (Stud-
ies in Mediterranean Archaeology, 49) (Goteborg: Paul Astroms Forlag, 1977),
provides a good commentary on the two grave circles and their contents. At
pages 50-51 Dickinson suggests that together the two circles span a period
of no more than "four or at most five generations, which need not represent
much more than a century in a period when average life-expectancy was so
short." - Cf. Muhly, "On the Shaft Graves," 316: "The one dramatic
transition in prehistoric Greece came towards the end of M.H.III, in the lat-
ter part of the seventeenth century B.C., and is represented by the Shaft
Graves at Mycenae. Nothing yet known from the impoverished Middle
Helladic period prepares one for the wealth and splendor of Shaft Grave
Mycenae."