linen cloth, were placed in a twelfth-century bronze amphora that was decorated with scenes of hunting.
Around the amphora were a whetstone and an iron sword and spear. The woman, however, had not been
cremated. She was buried, with an ivory-handled iron knife beside her head, in a posture that is
suggestive of the possibility that she had been sacrificed, perhaps like the horses, in connection with the
funeral of the man. Her body was lavishly decorated with gold ornaments. It would seem, then, that this
was the burial of a very powerful and wealthy individual. Ownership of horses is restricted to only the
most affluent of the ancient Greeks and the expense of the structure and the grave goods can only have
been borne by a handful of families in Greece at this time. But what was the function of the building? In
fact, not long after it was constructed, portions of the building were torn down and the whole structure
was covered over with a great mound of earth.
“With much lamentation Achilles quickly added four proud-necked horses to the pyre. There were
also nine dogs who accompanied their master at table and he slit the throats of two of them and
added them to the pyre, along with twelve well-born sons of the valorous Trojans, whom he
slaughtered with his bronze weapon ... In tears they gathered up the white bones of their sweet
companion, enclosing them in two layers of fat inside a golden urn, which they covered over with
fine linen and placed in his tent. Then they encircled the grave by setting foundation stones about the
pyre and immediately heaped up the earth over it.” (Homer, Iliad 23.171–6 and 252–6, describing
the funeral for Patroclus)All of these unusual circumstances have puzzled archaeologists and historians, who can only hypothesize
over the meaning of this extraordinary building. The archaeologists who were responsible for the original
excavation of the site proposed that the building was a heroon, or a shrine in honor of a hero, namely the
unnamed man, presumably a warrior, whose ashes were buried along with his horses, his wife or
concubine, and other personal effects. What is especially puzzling about the building at Lefkandi is its
isolation in both time and space. Nothing remotely like it from the Dark Age has been discovered by
archaeologists, and the community in which the building was constructed appears to have been too small
to produce either the human or other resources necessary for such an undertaking. Nor is it clear what the
source of the dead man’s wealth might have been. Perhaps he was a mercenary soldier who sold his
services as a warrior or perhaps a trafficker in human beings, a slave-dealer who sold other people’s
services, like the Phoenicians with whom, as we have seen, the Greeks interacted and competed at this
time. Despite all the questions that surround the tomb at Lefkandi, it appears that it somehow supplies a
precious piece of evidence, still requiring a great deal of interpretative ingenuity, that points to some
degree of continuity between practices of the Mycenaean Period and developments that were to occur at
the end of the Dark Age.
It is not clear whether it was the community as a whole or just the relatives of the (obviously quite
wealthy) deceased who were responsible for constructing this tomb. At any rate, during the Dark Age it
was generally the family of the deceased who were concerned with the arrangements of burial and the
maintenance of the grave. By the eighth century BC, families had begun to reduce their expenditure of
resources on lavish goods to be buried with the deceased and concentrated instead on calling attention to
the location of the burial with conspicuous markers like the Geometric amphora shown in figure 18. That
is to say, families appear to have begun to consider burial more as a form of display among the living, so
that funerary rituals, like the one depicted in the figured scene on the amphora, are likely to have become
more elaborate, while less emphasis was placed on the magnificence of the objects hidden away in the
earth with the dead. This conspicuous display in honor of deceased family members may have turned into