Palace of Nestor at Pylos (c. 1300 BC): A Mycenaean Palace

The Palace of Nestor is the ruin of a Mycenaean palace on the hill of Ano Englianos in Messenia, south-western Greece, that flourished from about 1300 BC until it burned around 1200-1180 BC. Discovered in 1939 by the American archaeologist Carl Blegen, it is the best-preserved palace of its kind on the Greek mainland. Its archive of clay tablets, baked hard by the fire that destroyed it, provided the key to reading the Mycenaean script known as Linear B.

Background: Pylos in legend and history

In Homer’s epics Pylos is the kingdom of Nestor, the aged and talkative king who leads ninety ships to Troy in the Iliad. In the Odyssey, Odysseus’s son Telemachus sails to “sandy Pylos” to ask Nestor for news of his father. Later Greeks argued about where Nestor’s Pylos had been, since several places bore the name.

Archaeology shows that the area was an important centre long before the palace was built. Rich tholos tombs and the Griffin Warrior grave, found nearby in 2015 and dated to about 1450 BC, show that a powerful elite lived here in the early Mycenaean period. The palace marks the final stage, when Pylos had become the capital of a state controlling much of Messenia.

Discovery and excavation

Blegen, of the University of Cincinnati, chose to test the Englianos ridge in a joint project with the Greek archaeologist Konstantinos Kourouniotis. On the first day of digging in April 1939, his trench cut into the archive room and produced inscribed clay tablets. About 600 were recovered that season.

The Second World War halted the work. Excavation resumed in 1952 and continued until the mid-1960s, revealing the full plan of the palace and raising the number of tablets to more than 1,000. Blegen and Marion Rawson published the architecture in 1966.

The palace and its throne room

The palace was a complex of linked buildings with no fortification wall, unlike Tiryns or Mycenae. Visitors passed through a gateway and a courtyard into the megaron, a large hall with a porch, a vestibule and a throne room.

The throne room had a large round clay hearth in the centre, ringed by four wooden columns that held up the roof and perhaps a raised gallery. A throne stood against the right-hand wall, with a channel in the floor beside it that may have been used for pouring liquid offerings. The walls were painted with frescoes, including griffins and lions flanking the throne and a figure playing a lyre. The floor was painted in a grid of coloured squares.

Around the megaron lay storerooms full of wine jars and large oil jars set into benches, a pantry with thousands of drinking cups, workshops and a bathroom containing a painted clay bathtub that is still in place.

The Linear B archive

The tablets were small clay records written by palace scribes and normally left unbaked. When the palace burned, the fire fired them like pottery. They list people, livestock, land, perfumed oil, bronze, chariots and armour, and they record offerings to gods, including names later known in classical Greek religion.

Emmett L. Bennett Jr published the Pylos texts in 1951. Using them, the English architect Michael Ventris showed in 1952 that Linear B wrote an early form of Greek; the story is told in Linear B. Some tablets mention rowers and watchers along the coast, which some historians read as signs of a threat in the palace’s last months, though this interpretation is debated.

Destruction and abandonment

Around 1200-1180 BC the palace was destroyed by an intense fire. Burnt oil in the storerooms fed the blaze, and in places the heat melted or vitrified materials. The site was not rebuilt as a palace, and the wider region saw a sharp fall in population afterwards.

Why the palace burned remains unknown. Suggestions include attack by outside raiders, internal revolt, or a combination of stresses, as part of the Late Bronze Age collapse that ended palace societies across Greece and the eastern Mediterranean.

Timeline

• c. 1450 BC: The Griffin Warrior is buried near the later palace site.
• c. 1300 BC: The main palace complex reaches its final form.
• c. 1200-1180 BC: Fire destroys the palace and bakes the tablet archive.
• April 1939: Carl Blegen and Konstantinos Kourouniotis begin digging and find the first tablets.
• 1951: Emmett L. Bennett Jr publishes the Pylos tablets.
• 1952: Michael Ventris announces the decipherment of Linear B; excavation at Pylos resumes.
• 2016: A new protective roof and walkways are opened over the ruins.

Why it matters

The Palace of Nestor gives the clearest picture of how a Mycenaean palace looked and worked. Its tablets turned the Mycenaeans from a silent archaeological culture into Greek speakers whose economy can be studied in detail, and its fiery end is one of the best-documented moments of the Bronze Age collapse.