Before Classical Greece came two Bronze Age civilizations around the Aegean Sea. The Minoans of Crete (named by a modern archaeologist after the legendary King Minos) built large palaces from about 1900 BC and traded across the sea. The Mycenaeans of mainland Greece built fortified citadels and were rich in gold; they took over Crete about 1450 BC.
Looking closely: Knossos. The palace at Knossos was a huge cluster of rooms, stairways and light wells around a central court, so tangled that later Greeks may have remembered it as the Labyrinth of legend. Here you see red columns that are wider at the top than at the bottom, a Minoan habit, and a wall painting of a bull. Be careful: the archaeologist Arthur Evans, who dug the site from 1900, rebuilt parts of it in reinforced concrete and repainted them. Some of what visitors see is his reconstruction, and scholars still argue over how much is right.
Minoan art loved the sea and nature. Pots of the Marine Style, about 1500 BC, are covered with octopuses whose arms wrap all the way around the vessel, as if it were underwater.
Looking closely: The Mask of Agamemnon. A face beaten from a thin sheet of gold: closed eyes, a long straight nose, a thin mouth, a neat beard and mustache drawn with fine lines, and ears sticking out at the sides. It covered the face of a man buried in a shaft grave at Mycenae. The flat, symmetrical design and the closed eyes give it a solemn calm. Heinrich Schliemann found it in 1876. Most experts accept it as genuine, though a few have questioned whether it was altered.
Key idea
Why it works
Worked example: Check the name
- The mask is about 300 years older than the Trojan War of legend.
- So it cannot be the face of a king who fought at Troy.
- The name "Mask of Agamemnon" is a nickname from its finder, not an identification.
Answer: The mask is centuries too old to be Agamemnon's.
Common mistake