Architecture
The destruction of the Cretan palaces left the mainland culture
supreme. Although this Late Helladic civilization has come to be
called Mycenaean, Mycenae was but one of several large palace com-
plexes. Archaeologists have also unearthed Mycenaean remains at
Tiryns, Orchomenos, Pylos, and elsewhere, and Mycenaean fortifica-
tion walls have even been found on the Acropolis of Athens. The
best-preserved and most impressive Mycenaean remains are those of
the fortified palaces at Tiryns and Mycenae. Both were built begin-
ning about 1400 BCEand burned (along with all the others) between
1250 and 1200 BCE, when the Mycenaeans seem to have been over-
run by northern invaders or to have fallen victim to internal warfare.
TIRYNSHomer knew the citadel of Tiryns (FIG. 4-15), located
about 10 miles from Mycenae, as Tiryns of the Great Walls. In the sec-
ond century CE, when Pausanias, author of an invaluable guidebook
to Greece, visited the long-abandoned site, he marveled at the tower-
ing fortifications and considered the walls of Tiryns as spectacular as
the pyramids of Egypt. Indeed, the Greeks of the historical age be-
lieved mere humans could not have erected such edifices and instead
attributed the construction of the great Mycenaean citadels to the
mythical Cyclopes,a race of one-eyed giants. Historians still refer to
the huge, roughly cut stone blocks forming the massive fortification
walls of Tiryns and other Mycenaean sites as Cyclopean masonry.
The heavy walls of Tiryns and Mycenae contrast sharply with the
open Cretan palaces (FIG. 4-4) and clearly reveal their defensive charac-
ter. Those of Tiryns average about 20 feet in thickness, and in one sec-
tion they house a long gallery (FIG. 4-16) covered by a corbeled vault
(FIG. 4-17b) similar to that constructed long before at Neolithic New-
grange (FIG. 1-19). At Tiryns, the builders piled the large, irregular
Cyclopean blocks in horizontal courses and then cantilevered them
inward until the two walls met in a pointed arch. No mortar was used,
and the vault is held in place only by the weight of the blocks (often
several tons each), by the smaller stones used as wedges, and by the clay
that fills some of the empty spaces. This primitive but effective vaulting
scheme possesses an earthy monumentality. It is easy to see how a laterMycenaean Art 914-16Corbeled gallery in the walls of the citadel, Tiryns, Greece,
ca. 1400–1200 bce.
The walls of Tiryns contain a long corbel-vaulted gallery in which
irregular Cyclopean blocks were piled in horizontal courses and then
cantilevered inward until the two walls met in a pointed arch.
4-17
Three methods
of spanning a
passageway:
(a) post and lintel,
(b) corbeled arch,
(c) arch.
Post-and-lintel
construction (a)
was the norm in
ancient Greece,
but the Mycenaeans
also used corbeled
arches (b). The round
arch (c), used already
in the Near East, was
popular in Rome.abc