Grave Circle A and the Mask of Agamemnon (c. 1600 BC) at Mycenae

Grave Circle A is a royal burial ground at Mycenae in southern Greece, containing six deep shaft graves dug around 1600–1500 BC. When Heinrich Schliemann opened them in 1876, he found the bodies of 19 people covered in gold, including the famous funeral mask he associated with King Agamemnon of Homer’s Iliad. The graves revealed the wealth of the first Mycenaean rulers and launched the study of Bronze Age Greece.

Background: Mycenae before the palace

Mycenae stands on a rocky hill in the Argolid, in the north-eastern Peloponnese, controlling routes between the Argive plain and the Gulf of Corinth. In Greek legend it was the city of Agamemnon, who led the Greeks against Troy.

Around 1600 BC, in the period archaeologists call the transition from the Middle to the Late Helladic, a small group of families at Mycenae began burying their dead with extraordinary riches. This was well before the great palace, the Cyclopean walls and the Lion Gate were built in the 14th and 13th centuries BC. The shaft graves are therefore among the earliest signs of a powerful Mycenaean elite.

The shaft graves

A shaft grave is a deep rectangular pit cut into the rock, with a burial chamber at the bottom roofed with wooden beams and stone slabs, then filled with earth. Stone grave markers, or stelae, some carved with chariots and hunting scenes, stood above them.

Grave Circle A contained six such graves, numbered I to VI. They held a total of 19 people, usually counted as 8 men, 9 women and 2 children. The graves were reused over several generations, with older remains and objects pushed aside to make room for new burials.

Around 1250 BC, more than two centuries after the last burial, the Mycenaeans extended the citadel wall to enclose the cemetery. They levelled the ground and surrounded it with a double ring of upright stone slabs about 27 metres in diameter. This suggests that the graves were honoured as the tombs of ancestors or heroes.

The treasures

The graves contained more gold than any other Bronze Age site in Greece. Men in Graves IV and V wore gold masks hammered from thin sheets, five in all. Women wore gold diadems and ornaments, and two infants in Grave III were wrapped in gold foil.

Other finds included gold and silver cups, among them a two-handled gold cup with birds on the handles that Schliemann called “Nestor’s Cup”; a silver rhyton, or ritual drinking vessel, shaped like a bull’s head; bronze swords and daggers inlaid with gold, silver and niello, one showing a lion hunt; and hundreds of gold discs decorated with spirals, octopuses and butterflies.

Exotic materials show long-distance contacts. Amber beads came ultimately from the Baltic, an ostrich egg was made into a vessel in the style of Minoan Crete, and many objects show Cretan craftsmanship or influence.

Schliemann’s excavation

Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman turned archaeologist, had already excavated at Troy in north-west Turkey. Guided by the ancient travel writer Pausanias, who said the tombs of Agamemnon and his companions lay within the walls of Mycenae, he began digging there in August 1876, working with his wife Sophia.

The Greek government appointed the archaeologist Panagiotis Stamatakis to supervise the work, and relations between the two men were often tense. Between August and December 1876 Schliemann uncovered five graves. Stamatakis found the sixth in 1877, after Schliemann had left.

Schliemann announced his finds in telegrams to the King of Greece and to newspapers, claiming that he had found the graves of Agamemnon and his followers. His book Mycenae, published in 1878, made the discovery world-famous.

The Mask of Agamemnon

The most famous mask came from Grave V and was found in late November 1876. It shows a bearded man with a moustache, closed eyes and distinct, cut-out ears. Unlike the rounder, more schematic faces of the other masks, it has a noble, almost classical look.

Schliemann connected it with Agamemnon, and the name stuck. But the grave dates to around 1550–1500 BC, roughly three hundred years before the Trojan War is usually placed, if it happened at all. The real identity of the man is unknown.

Some scholars, notably William Calder III and David Traill, have questioned whether the mask is entirely genuine, suggesting that Schliemann may have had features such as the moustache added. Most archaeologists disagree, pointing to Stamatakis’s presence, the mask’s manufacturing technique and the variety among Mycenaean masks. It is displayed today in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Who were the dead?

The people buried in Grave Circle A were clearly members of a ruling group, but we do not know whether they were kings, chiefs or leading families sharing power. The many weapons buried with the men, and the hunting and chariot scenes on the stelae, suggest an elite that valued warfare and display.

Where their wealth came from is debated. Some scholars stress raiding and service as warriors abroad, perhaps even in Egypt; others emphasise control of trade routes and contacts with Minoan Crete, whose craftsmen probably made or inspired many of the finest objects. Most likely several sources combined.

The shaft graves mark a turning point. Over the following centuries the rulers of Mycenae began building monumental tholos tombs, such as the Treasury of Atreus, and eventually a palace administered with Linear B records. Grave Circle A captures the moment when this power first became visible.

Legacy

Schliemann’s discovery transformed scholarly opinion. Before 1876 many historians regarded the Greek heroic age as pure legend; afterwards it was clear that a rich, sophisticated civilisation had existed on the mainland in the second millennium BC. His methods, however, were rough even by the standards of his day, and many details of the graves’ contents and layers were poorly recorded. Modern archaeologists still work to reconstruct which objects belonged to which burial.

Myths and facts

Myth: Schliemann said, “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.” This famous line is often quoted, but it does not appear in his telegrams or publications and is probably a later invention.

Myth: the graves belong to the heroes of the Trojan War. They are centuries older than any likely date for the war, as explained in our article on the Trojan War.

Fact: a second grave circle exists. Grave Circle B, outside the walls, was discovered in 1951 and excavated by Ioannis Papadimitriou and George Mylonas. It is slightly older and its burials include an electrum mask.

Timeline

• c. 1600–1500 BC: Burials in the six shaft graves of Grave Circle A.
• c. 1250 BC: The citadel wall is extended to enclose the graves within a ring of stone slabs.
• 2nd century AD: Pausanias records that the tombs of Agamemnon lay inside the walls.
• 1876, August: Heinrich Schliemann begins excavating at Mycenae.
• 1876, November: The Mask of Agamemnon is found in Grave V.
• 1877: Panagiotis Stamatakis excavates the sixth grave.
• 1878: Schliemann publishes Mycenae.
• 1951: Grave Circle B is discovered outside the walls.

Why it matters

Grave Circle A showed that the “golden Mycenae” of Homer reflected a real Bronze Age civilisation. Its treasures document the rise of Greece’s first rulers and their ties with Minoan Crete, and the Mask of Agamemnon remains one of the most recognisable objects of ancient Greece.