CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Mycenaean Art
Art of Bronze Age mainland Greece, c. 1600–1100 BC: gold death masks, inlaid daggers, fortified citadels, beehive tombs and frescoes.
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About
The Mycenaeans were the Greek-speaking Bronze Age people of the mainland, named after Mycenae in the Peloponnese, and their culture thrived from about 1600 to 1100 BC. Early wealth appears in the shaft graves at Mycenae, excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876: gold face masks hammered for dead rulers, and bronze daggers inlaid in gold and silver with lion hunts.
Mycenaean art borrowed heavily from Minoan Crete, adopting its fresco painting and goldsmithing, but gave them a harder, martial edge. Citadels at Mycenae and Tiryns were ringed by walls of boulders so huge that later Greeks credited them to the Cyclopes, and the Lion Gate (about 1250 BC) sets two carved beasts above the entrance. The Treasury of Atreus, a beehive tomb, has a corbelled stone dome that was not exceeded in span for over a thousand years. Clay tablets in Linear B, deciphered in 1952, proved the language was early Greek.