It's All Greek To Me

This past weekend we hosted the British Epigraphy Society‘s annual Spring Meeting – as well as papers and posters about current research in the study of inscriptions (from Mesopotamian cuneiform to poetry in Byzantine graves, and plenty in between), we had a visit to the Durham Museum of Archaeology to see (and handle!) some of their Roman inscribed objects, and a post-conference field trip to Chesters Roman fort to see its much larger collection of inscriptions from Hadrian’s Wall. And, of course, I took the chance to do some conference-related epigraphic baking! The language of this inscription, Oscan (found in southern Italy from around the 5th-1st centuries BCE, and fairly closely related to Latin), has featured in my cake series before – but since the first paper of the conference was going to be on some newly-discovered Oscan inscriptions, it seemed only appropriate to feature one of them in cake form. Plus, this language was regularly written in two different alphabets – its own Oscan alphabet, as seen on the previous cake, and (a slightly adapted form of) the Greek alphabet, as seen in this new one:

This new inscription was found, along with four others, in 2024 at the site of Rossano di Vaglio, a sanctuary in Basilicata (southern Italy) chiefly dedicated to the goddess Mefitis; all five were published in 2025 by Massimo Osanna, Carlo Rescigno, Rossana Caputo, Carmen D’Anna, and Dan Diffendale (open-access article, in Italian). At the conference, my Durham colleague Katherine McDonald and Nick Zair (Cambridge) were discussing the new information they provide for both the Oscan language and practices of setting up dedications and commemorative inscriptions at this site. The text is carved along the top of a squarish block of limestone, roughly 65cm high, as shown in this photo and drawing from the publication:

This stone was set up next to a paved road leading into the main area of the sanctuary – a courtyard with a double altar, surrounded by various buildings, shown in the photo below.

The inscription reads:

ΝΙΜΖΙΣ · ΣΑΔΙΡΙΙΕΣ · ΝΙΜ · / ΚϜΑΙΣΤΟΡ · ΡΕΣΤΟFΑΑΑ / ΑFΑΑΜΑΤΤΕΔ

or, in Roman transcription:

nimzis sadrīes nim kwaistor restof{aaa} afāmatted

(· is the small mark separating words; the letter that looks like a C is s; the letter that looks like an S is f; / in the transcription denotes a line-break; we’ll get to the { } shortly!).

The first four words translate as “Nimzis Sadiries (son of) Nimzis, quaestor” (the title of a public official)”. The second half is a bit trickier. The curly brackets around the {aaa} mean that this appears to be a mistake by the person who carved the inscription – did they try to start writing the final word afāmatted, realise they’d left out the f, and just start over on the next line? afāmatted is already known from other inscription as a verb meaning “he had made”, but restof is a new word (very exciting for scholars of Oscan!) Katherine and Nick were explaining various different possible linguistic interpretations in their talk, but whatever the exact interpretation, it looks like it has something to do with “restoration”. So restof afāmatted probably means something along the lines of “had the restoration carried out”, and the whole inscription is restoration work to (part of?) the sanctuary organised by Nimzis Sadiries son of Nimzis during his term of office as quaestor.

If you enjoyed this post, you can check out all my previous epigraphic/linguistic baking (14 years’ worth!) – and follow the blog to find out what other ancient writing system will be next!

Thanks to Chris de Lisle for doing nearly all the conference organisation, the BES for sponsoring it, Katherine and Nick for their paper (and Katherine again for suggesting the cake should feature one of these inscriptions in the first place!) and Dan Diffendale for permission to use his images in this post.

The New Documents in Mycenaean Greek (edited by John Killen) is the long-awaited update to the foundational work of the study of the Linear B tablets of Mycenaean (Late Bronze Age) Greece – Michael Ventris and John Chadwick’s Documents in Mycenaean Greek. This work was first published in 1956 (just four years after Ventris’ decipherment of the script), and then updated for a second edition in 1973. Hence why the latest update (really a rewrite, as shown by the title, with contributions from a wide range of experts in the field of Mycenology) has been eagerly awaited for some time! It will be a crucial reference work for anyone working on the Linear B tablets – it’s certainly extremely useful for students on my own MA course in Linear B and Mycenaean Greek – but to find out more details about why, as well as some caveats on the less successful aspects and tips on how to use it most productively as a student or researcher, you can read my review in full on the Bryn Mawr Classical Review website.

Presenting the most recent addition to my now very long-running series of inscriptions in various ancient writing systems in cake form: a cake version of an inscription from Pompeii, written not in Latin, but in a closely-related language called Oscan.

Though Latin would eventually spread across not only the whole of Italy but also much further afield, originally it was just one of a whole family of related languages (known as Italic) spoken across the Italian peninsula. The map below is only approximate, since it’s very difficult to fully map exactly where different languages were spoken, especially since many people and places will have been multilingual, but it gives an idea of where Oscan was primarily found, along with other related Italic languages (e.g. Latin, Umbrian, Venetic) and others like Greek or Etruscan.

Although the Oscan language is closely related to Latin, you might have noticed that the cake inscription above doesn’t look quite like the Roman alphabet – some letters are pretty similar, but others are totally different, and the whole thing is also written right-to-left. In fact, the two alphabets are also quite closely related, as both were derived from the alphabet used to write the Etruscan language – a language spoken and written widely across the northern part of the Italian peninsula, not actually related to the Italic family, or for that matter any other known family. The Etruscan alphabet, however, was the source of many of the alphabets used to write other languages of the Italian peninsula (the other main one was the Greek alphabet – itself the original source of the Etruscan alphabet; Oscan was in fact written with both its own alphabet and with a version of the Greek alphabet).

As you can see from the alphabet above, some of the differences with the Roman alphabet are just because Oscan is written right-to-left, so the letters’ orientation is reversed – but others involve more radical differences of shape (in particular, what looks like an R is actually /d/, and what looks like D is an /r/) or additions of new letters needed to write the Oscan language (the three at the end of the alphabet). I’ll transcribe and translate the cake inscription below, but you could have a go first at transcribing it yourself using this alphabet if you want!

The Bay of Naples, where Pompeii is located, is in an area on the map marked as Greek-speaking, but was actually one of those multilingual areas: both Greek and Oscan were in widespread use until the city was incorporated into the expanding area of Roman control and Latin became the language of official business, after which use of Oscan gradually declined here as across the peninsula (the last known Oscan inscriptions date to about 50 BCE, though it’s likely that the language continued to be spoken for some period of time after this before eventually dying out). However, in Pompeii, a range of Oscan inscriptions from the period when this language was still in regular use survived long enough that they were preserved when the whole city was buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. This particular inscription was put up to commemorate a building being put up by a Pompeiian official, though we don’t know what that building was because the stone was later re-used in building one of the city’s gates. Here’s the inscription transcribed, then transcribed with abbreviations expanded, and then translated (| = a line-break):

v · púpidiis · v | med · túv | aamanaffed | ísídu | prúfatted

v(ibis) · púpidiis · v(ibieís) | med(dís) · túv(tíks) | aamanaffed | ísídu | prúfatted

Vibius Popidius, son of Vibius | chief magistrate | built | the same man | approved

i.e. “Vibius Popidius, son of Vibius, chief magistrate, built this building and the same man also approved it”

Oh, and the red colour of the icing is not just because I got bored of using grey or black for my ancient inscription cakes – many ancient inscriptions, both Oscan and Latin, had red-painted letters for greater visibility, traces of which sometimes survive to allow a reconstruction of the original colour. You can see this on the British Museum’s photograph of the actual inscription, where the red colour has been repainted in modern times:

The excuse for making this cake – and the venue for eating it – was provided by my colleague Katherine McDonald organising an Oscan reading group to introduce us to the language, the alphabet, and a few of the inscriptions: you can find an online version of this on Katherine’s website if you’d like to have a go at reading some Oscan yourself!

Regular blog readers may remember that during my time at the British School at Athens, I was experimenting with different methods of making clay tablets, trying to find out why the makers of these tablets in the Mycenaean palace of Pylos would have chosen different ways of doing so and how this affected their use in writing administrative documents in the Linear B script. I’m delighted that my article describing these experiments and my conclusions has now been published online in the ‘Annual of the British School at Athens‘. It’s fully open-access, so free for everyone to read – but if you want the short version, you can also read a blog post I wrote for the Cambridge University Press blog about this below. I’ve also linked the video I made about how to make tablets, which comes with English and Greek versions of a worksheet to use at home or school if you want to try tablet-making (and writing) yourself!

I was delighted to find out recently that I’d been shortlisted for my entry for the Classical Association’s 2023 competition. This competition takes different forms every year: this year was photography, and the brief was to take a photo that fitted into one of several themes relating to Plato’s philosophy. The theme of “Shadows in the Cave” – referring to the allegory used in the Republic to describe human beings as like prisoners in a cave who can see only shadows cast on the wall, and a philosopher as someone who is released from the cave to see the true reality outside – made me think of the way the windows of the Acropolis Museum in Athens reflect images of the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis opposite the museum: something about the glass and the arrangement of the panes creates a repeated set of distorted images of the temple’s columns.

As I wrote to explain my entry: “The windows of the Acropolis Museum reflect the wall of the Acropolis and the columns of the Parthenon – a clearly recognisable, but distorted, reflection of reality, as the shadows in Plato’s cave are. The museum itself was built to mirror the visitor’s ascent up the slopes of the Acropolis, and the top floor presents the Parthenon’s sculptural decoration (a mixture of originals and casts) in the same alignment as the temple, reflecting their original locations as viewed through the gallery windows. But can the picture of the ancient reality presented inside this – or any – museum ever be more than a reflection as distorted as the one seen on the outside?”

You can see all the winning entries, and download a booklet with the winning and shortlisted photographs, on the CA website. The photos are all wonderful and there are some really creative responses to the themes, so do check them out!

It’s been a pretty busy time since I started a new job in Durham, hence the blog has been a bit quiet lately! I’ve been teaching classical Greek and Latin language, and also a lecture course on the history of writing – a mixture of lectures on particular writing systems (obviously including my research topic of Linear B) and thematic explorations of topics to do with writing across the ancient world, like power, religion, or gender. The lecture on ‘graffiti’ was an opportunity to explore issues around this term in the modern world as well as the ancient – we tend to think of graffiti as something illegal, a form of vandalism, and yet some people who draw on walls get elevated to the status of ‘street artists’ (Banksy being the prime example in the UK, and also a good example of the tension in the conception of street art: Banksys can sell for millions, but every so often there’s a case of one being removed as ‘graffiti’ – which promptly makes headlines).

Graffiti in the ancient world can appear superficially similar to contemporary graffiti. The term often refers to writing on walls, whether painted, inked, or most often scratched in, though can also be used to refer to writing on other surfaces not originally intended to be written on, e.g. an inscription scratched into a pot, and many of the themes feel very familiar: political slogans, romantic or obscene declarations, cartoon drawings, “X was here”, etc. On the other hand, there are also a lot of differences, even if we just focus on the category of ‘writing on walls’ that seems closest to modern ‘graffiti’: for a start, although there are occasional complaints about graffiti (“Whoever writes anything here, let him rot and be nameless.” – Pompeii, CIL IV 7521 – itself a graffito!), it wasn’t ‘illegal’ or ‘vandalism’ per se, but a widespread form of written communication among people of highly varying social statuses and for a wide variety of purposes. In fact, although we think of graffiti as a public-facing form of writing, nearly half the graffiti in Pompeii – one of our best sources of ancient Roman graffiti – actually comes from inside private houses and will in many cases have been written by their inhabitants (see the extensive work by Rebecca Benefiel on this subject).

All of this is by way of back-story to explain why I was recently going through my collection of photographs of Athenian street art to find some nice examples to illustrate the lecture. Athens has a flourishing street art culture – everything from small paintings on fences, hoardings, or abandoned buildings, to multi-storey murals supported by public arts funding or commissioned by building owners. During my time in Athens, I did a lot of walking around the city spotting interesting street art, and obviously a particular interest of mine was the wide range of art inspired by classical Greek mythology and archaeology (one inspiration among many – political commentary being another major theme). So this post is mainly just to share pictures of a few of my favourite examples of classical Athenian street art. Let’s start with a classic (pun intended) and very famous example: this owl, symbol of the goddess Athena and therefore also of Athens, which stares out at the city reflected in its eyes:

A more temporary installation, which for all I know is already gone. I love the juxtaposition here of the rundown neoclassical building, the classical sculpture, and the colourful geometric background:

Sometimes wandering down the small, deserted, derelict streets can bring unexpected benefits, like when I happened upon this street, in the tourist area of Plaka but definitely not on the tourist routes:

There are quite a few of these paintings of mythological characters by The Krah all over the city – here are two more:

Two depictions of Icarus – one still flying, one already falling:

This series of paintings may not be as technically accomplished, but I always enjoyed the bright colours and the juxtaposed political message about cultural preservation.

To be honest, I have no idea what’s going on in most of this picture, but it’s got a broken classical column in it that’s definitely significant. Also the best hybrid fish-monster ever.

More shop shutters, which are a very frequent street art canvas. Here I like the way the city with the Acropolis in the background (left) and the Caryatid porch of the Erechtheion (right) seem to be shaking and fracturing: another comment on cultural heritage preservation?

This depiction of the ancient Athenian lawgiver Solon, entitled “System of a Fraud”, shows classical art is very much also still political:

Less politically meaningful, perhaps, but I enjoy how these three paintings of classical objects imitate another form of art, linocut printing.

And finally, if you take a ferry out of the port of Piraeus, look to the right of the boat as you leave and see if you can spot this celebration of Greek underwater archaeology:

If you want to find these and many other pieces of street art in Athens, try Street Art Cities’ map. There are lots of street art walking tours on offer; I can recommend this one. Or just wander round the city – especially areas like Exarcheia, Metaxourgeio, Psyrri, and Gazi – and see what you can spot for yourself!

One of the first things a classicist does after moving to Durham is, obviously, to pay a visit to Hadrian’s Wall: the wall begun by the Roman emperor Hadrian in 122 CE to mark the northern frontier of the Roman empire in Britain, whihc now runs across Cumbria and Northumberland. Housesteads is one of several forts along the wall that can be visited today – in fact, the best preserved of the forts, with remains of the four gateways, commander’s house, soldiers’ barracks, the hospital, granaries, and the famous toilets. Of course, in Roman archaeology, ‘best preserved’ still generally means a series of low stone walls marking the outlines of the buildings. Right now, though, Housesteads is looking a bit different – and more colourful – than usual:

As part of “Hadrian’s Wall 1900” – the celebration of 1900 years since the wall was begun – artist Morag Myerscough has created a new (temporary) gatehouse for the fort’s northern gateway. Called “The Future Belongs To What Was As Much As What Is“, the structure is made up of scaffolding on the inside and 300 neon-painted panels on the outside. Some have patterns inspired by Roman designs; others have words and phrases contributed by poet Ellen Moran and by local people living near the wall talking about what it means to them. These range from the cheerful – “love”, “freedom”, “everybody’s welcome” – to the thoughtful – “memories”, “liminal”, “on the edge of the unknown” – to the more depressing – “desolate”, “cold wet stone” – and they include at least three languages: English, Latin, and (in a couple of references to the Berlin Wall, and maybe also to the Germanic origins of many of the soldiers stationed here) German.

In a video about the project screened in the site’s museum, Myerscough talks about wanting to let people stand where the soldiers on watch would have stood and looked out over the landscape: so you can climb up inside the gatehouse to the level of the wall’s original height and peer out of narrow windows southwards, into the fort, or northwards, out beyond the frontier. For me, though, it was from the outside that the gatehouse made the most impression. Obviously the first things that strike you, even from all the way across the valley, are the colours and the size: whatever direction you look from, the gatehouse looms over the low stone walls that remain of the original fort, giving a much more tangible impression of how much the fort’s walls and towers – and the Wall itself – would have dominated the landscape.

Once you get closer, you can start to see the more intricate details of the designs and read the slogans painted on the boards. Of course, the original gatehouse wouldn’t have been neon; but nor would it – or the whole of the rest of the fort – have been just bleak grey stone. Outside walls would have been whitewashed, roofs would have been tiled, inside walls could have been painted in bright (if not neon!) colours, people would have had colourful clothes and belongings – and although there probably wouldn’t have been slogans reading “just get on with life”, “surreal” or “kaleidoscope wall”, the place would have been full of inscriptions, from the official ones put up to commemorate the building of the wall and the fort to graffiti scratched in the walls (I just bet the original gatehouse had plenty of “Marcus was here” type graffiti left by bored soldiers).

I found Myerscough’s gatehouse to be a fantastic engagement with, and addition to, the site. It’s a recreation and yet totally modern; it consists of bright neon colours and words from 21st-century people and yet manages to evoke aspects of life in Roman Housesteads that are otherwise largely invisible. It’s also part of an ongoing series of academic and artistic demonstrations that ancient art (and architecture) was not just plain white (or grey) stone – and although this isn’t something this particular project seems to be talking about directly, I think it’s important to say that these demonstrations frequently also provide pushbacks against the use of that mistaken image of the ancient world by racist and white supremacist ideologies (content note: linked article contains direct quotations of racist, anti-Semitic and white supremacist statements). And even if you don’t want to (over)analyse your art installations as much I as do, it’s visually an incredibly striking and – I think – stunning addition to the fort in its landscape, and I definitely encourage anyone in the area who wants to see a different way of looking at the Roman Wall to go visit!

The art installation is scheduled to run until October 30th 2022. Housesteads Roman Fort is managed by English Heritage; see their website for prices, opening times, and access information. Public transport to the site is via train to Hexham or Haltwhistle and then the AD122 bus, which runs along the wall every 2 hours. Other events for Hadrian’s Wall 1900 are taking place on and around the wall until late December: see the event information page. And if you go to Housesteads or to any other of the events, or if you’ve already been, let me know what you thought in the comments!

Nearly two years ago, I was preparing to move to Athens to start a new research project ‘Writing at Pylos’ (acronym: WRAP), funded by the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, at the British School at Athens. It’s hard to believe that I’m now in the final stages of wrapping up the project (pun very much intended) before starting a new job in just a couple of days’ time: from September 1st I will officially be an Assistant Professor (Teaching) in the Department of Classics & Ancient History at Durham, teaching mostly classical Greek and Latin language, with a bit of epigraphy too (and yes, even some Linear B!).

2020 was a pretty strange year to be moving to a new country, for the obvious reasons, and things didn’t always quite go according to plan – but I’m thrilled to have been able to spend nearly two years getting to know Athens and Greece better, vastly improving my Greek, visiting many wonderful places, and of course carrying out my research into the Linear B tablets from Pylos at the BSA and in the National Archaeological Museum. A few highlights have been finally publishing an article on Linear B spelling and how writers may have learned to spell, which I started work on back in my previous postdoctoral position in Cambridge; carrying out an experimental archaeology project to learn more about how the clay tablets were made before being written on, which was something entirely new to me, and which you can learn more about – and try yourself! – via my video and activity sheet about making tablets (in English and Greek); and, just before leaving, spending a fantastic two weeks teaching ten students about Linear B, the Mycenaean Greek language, and Mycenaean archaeology on the BSA’s Postgradute Linear B course – a lovely way to round off my time in Athens!

You can read more about all my activities in Athens – from visiting archaeological sites to Wikipedia editing and, of course, baking epigraphy cake – in my archive of project posts. Of course, I’ll keep updating here as the various other publications I have in progress appear, including an article on my experimental tablet-making which I hope will be out in 2023, as well as sharing news about my teaching and other activities in Durham. But for now, to everyone in Athens, ευχαριστώ πάρα πολύ και ελπίζω να τα ξαναπούμε σύντομα – thank you so much and hope to see you again soon!

Last (for now!) in my series of virtual tours of Mycenaean sites, following Tiryns and Mycenae in the north-east Peloponnese, is this tour of Thebes in Boeotia, north-west of Athens (Myceanean te-qa Thēgwai, classical Greek Θῆβαι Thēbai, modern Greek Θήβα Thiva).

This one is a bit different from the last two, because unlike most other Mycenaean palatial sites we know, the citadel of Thebes has been continuously occupied from the Bronze Age to the present day – so the central area of the Mycenaean site corresponds more or less exactly to the modern town centre. Evidently, this makes excavation a challenge; much of the work that’s been done has been rescue excavations before construction work, so relatively few of the excavated areas remain visible, and because excavations have taken place in lots of separate, mostly unconnected sites, it’s very hard to get a joined-up picture of the Mycenaean citadel as a whole. Below is a Google map of locations mentioned in this post; this interactive map, the product of Dr Anastasia Dakouri-Hild’s ‘Digital Thebes’ project’, is also handy for seeing where excavations have taken place even where the results are not visible (you can choose various layers to show finds from different time-periods, including plans of buildings which may be associated with the Mycenaean (Late Helladic) palace and findspots of ‘palatial’-type objects such as Linear B inscriptions, frescoes, and craft workshops).

Our first stop is the Archaeological Museum of Thebes, which reopened a few years ago after a long renovation and covers the history of Thebes from the Neolithic onwards. The large Mycenaean gallery is very nicely presented, with lots of wonderful finds from Thebes and nearby sites like Orchomenos. Some highlights for me: obviously, the Linear B tablets and inscribed stirrup jars; the frescoes, especially the procession of women from Thebes; and the clay larnakes (coffins) painted with mourning women.

Make sure to go downstairs to see the excavations underneath the museum, including a section of the Mycenaean fortfication wall and an Early Bronze Age house (destroyed c.2300-2200 BCE – i.e. about a thousand years earlier than the Mycenaean period). There are also plenty of very nice classical, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine finds – allow a couple of hours for the whole thing! The museum website also has lots of information and suggested walking routes to discover the archaeology of Thebes; and if you can’t get there in person, it’s worth checking out their virtual gallery tour.

Leaving the museum and walking a couple of blocks up Odos Pindarou (Pindar Street), you’ll reach the main visible excavated remains in Thebes – the so-called ‘Kadmeion’, or ‘Palace of Kadmos’. The best-preserved remains, directly in front of the information board, are actually medieval; the Mycenaean building is on the right of the exposed site, at a slight angle to and a bit higher up than the modern street. Excavated by archaeologist Antonios Keramopoulos between 1906 and 1929, this large, (at least) two-storey building was interpreted as the palace of Kadmos, the mythical founder of Thebes due to its impressive ashlar masonry and finds including frescos and precious materials like gold and ivory; much of the material in the museum labelled as coming from the ‘palace’ was found here. However, this building doesn’t have the classic architectural plan that we associate with a Mycenaean palace – generally a large structure containing a ‘megaron‘ complex, consisting of a throne-room with a central hearth surrounded by pillars, with a small ante-room and porch giving onto a courtyard; most likely it was an outlying building in which palatial authorities managed trade, storage, and craft production (similar to the Ivory Houses at Mycenae).

To the left of the medieval remains, the structure made of large, regular rectangular stones is the corner of a Classical building (possibly a temple of Demeter); the lower walls in the back corner may not look like much, but they’re the outside walls of a room known as the Treasury because of the many valuable finds made there – including a set of Near Eastern lapis lazuli seals, also on display in the museum – which may be part of the ‘palace’ proper: the current excavators, led by Vassilis Aravantinos, interpret this as the north-eastern corner of a palace complex, along with the adjacant ‘Room of Pithoi’ (mostly underneath Odos Antigonis/Antigone Street), and a series of three more long narrow storage rooms excavated on the far side of Antigonis (if you go round the corner from the Kadmeion signboard, you can see the excavation trenches on this site, but not much of the structure is visible). The rest of the palace, including the throne-room, may therefore still be under the city block where the central plateia is located.

We can at least get a sense of the possible scale of this (potential) palace building by walking to the two sites where the largest collections of Linear B tablets have been found. The first of these, on the corner of Odos Epaminonda and Odos Dimokritou (Epaminondas and Dimokritos Streets), is just a block or so from the Treasury: it’s a three-room, single storey building (walls of two of the rooms are visible, when the vegetation has been cut back…) which produced 16 Linear B tablets dealing with the issue of wool to workers, mostly groups of women, as part of the palace’s textile production industry; the building was probably therefore used for collecting, storing, and distributing this wool.

Crossing the plateia and heading to Odos Pelopidou (Pelops Street), we reach a large excavated area in which, again, you may not be able to see much (the photo below was taken several years ago in December; on my recent visit in summer this was nearly all overgrown), but you’ll have seen weapons and horse-trappings from this building in the museum, hence its name of the Arsenal. The Linear B tablets from this site are often interpreted as recording armour (including in the museum), but in fact we’re not entirely sure what the items they record (denoted only by the abbrevation O) are. Just next to the Arsenal, under the road, is where the largest group of Theban Linear B tablets was found – sewage works in the 1990s led to the discovery of two storerooms containing c.250 tablets, many of which record the issue of grain and wine to recipients who are probably participants in a festival (though their status, and particularly whether any/all of them are deities receiving offerings rather than humans receiving festival rations, is debated).

Like the Kadmeion, all these sites seem to be administrative and storage buildings, located on either side of the (putative) central palace complex. Although we can see various different types of administrative activity associated with the palace, we don’t know exactly how these buildings all relate to each other – they may well date to two or three different time-periods, rather than all being contemporary, but that’s also hard to pin down as a lot of the excavated material has not been properly published. You can probably see by now why Thebes is much less well-understood as a site than Mycenae, Tiryns, or Pylos!

We’ll finish off the tour by walking outside the citadel via Odos Oidipodos (Oedipus Street), the site of one of the Mycenaean gates, where a large collection of sealings – small pieces of clay with a seal impression and a short Linear B inscription, which accompanied goods into the citadel and were discarded here at the gate, presumably after their contents had been recorded in another form. Walking down the hill and then turning left along the path through the ‘biopark’, you’re walking along the outside of where the Mycenaean fortification would have been located on the slope of the hill, though very little survives – you can see a tiny bit at the corner of Odos Vourdoumpa (Voudourba Street). Before that, though, heading slightly to the right from the biopark path will bring you to Kastelli hill, site of one of the Mycenaean cemeteries. Head up the steps on the right of the road and follow the path to see the largest of the chamber tombs cut into the rock of this hill – made by combining two separate tombs, hence the two adjacent entrance passages, this was elaborately decorated with wall-paintings and so has been interpreted as a royal tomb, the equivalent of the tholos tombs at other sites.

Finally, it’s time to head back to the plateia for a well-deserved cold drink!

Practical information

Getting there: trains from Athens leave Larisis Station every 2 hours and take approx. 1 hour; from the train station to the museum is c.850m (uphill). The museum has a small car park. Buses from Athens leave the Kifisos bus station every 1-2 hours on weekdays, every 2-3 hours on weekends, and take c.1hr; from the bus station to the museum is c.950m. Driving from Athens also takes c.1-1.5 hrs; the museum has a small car park. For opening hours, prices, etc, see the museum website.

Access: The main route through the museum involves two changes of level via a few steps or a wheelchair lift; the excavations under the museum are accessed by a staircase or chairlift. Part of one room in the Byzantine section is accessible only via a couple of steps. The museum has an accessible toilet. Most sites described are viewable only from the street. The complete tour described in this post is c.2km in length; many parts of the route feature narrow and/or uneven pavements, and the chamber tomb is accessed via a few steps and across a gravel path.

Facilities: the museum cafe did not appear to be operational when I visited, but there is a kiosk for drinks and snacks next to the museum car park, and plenty of shops and cafes along Odos Pindarou and around the central plateia.

Following on from last year’s virtual tour of the Mycenaean site of Tiryns, now it’s the turn of the site after which the “Mycenaean” societies of Late Bronze Age Greece are named – Mycenae (ancient Greek Μυκήναι, modern Greek Μυκήνες Mikines). This impressive fortified citadel is only about 20km from Tiryns, which was probably a subordinate/secondary site to Mycenae (although the exact relationship between the two is disputed), so if travelling by car the two can easily be done in one trip. Read on for the tour!

As you walk towards the entrance, you can see a circular area with a few pits dug in it and a single upright stone. This is Grave Circle B, a burial area used from c.1700-1500 BCE: 35 people were buried over this period in 26 different graves. Before this, individual burials took place all over the slopes of the citadel facing you: this is the first time we see some graves being used for multiple burials and marked out as special by placing them in a separate area (some also marked with stelai like the single upright stone you can see), a process that we’ll see the culmination of shortly.

Walking up the slope towards the citadel, you approach the famous Lion Gate. The fortification walls are made of such enormous rocks they’re known as ‘Cyclopean’, because legend had it that only the giant Cyclopes could have moved these rocks into position.

This wall and gate were never buried completely – even after the Mycenaean period Mycenae’s location remained known (and it was periodically reoccupied). When Heinrich Schliemann started excavating here in 1876, under the superivsion of the Greek archaeologist Panayotis Stamatakis, he started digging just inside the gate, and discovered ‘Grave Circle A’. So-called because it was discovered much earlier than Grave Circle B (found in the 1950s), this grave circle actually came into use a bit later than the other: most of the burials are from 1600-1500 BCE, though there are a few later ones up to c.1400. The six ‘shaft graves’ – deep pits with a walled and roofed burial chamber at the bottom – contained spectacular finds like the famous ‘Mask of Agamemnon’ which are now on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

When the graves were actually in use (like those in Grave Circle B, each was repeatedly reopened for new burials), they were actually outside the wall of the citadel – the arrangement you see now, with the circle inside the fortification wall and surrounded by a double circle of upright stone slabs, dates to c.1400 BCE (after the grave circle had stopped being used for burials) when extensive works were carried out on the fortifications, including the construction of the Lion Gate and the enclosure of Grave Circle A and the nearby ritual buildings known as the ‘Cult Centre’ (to the left beyond the roofed house as you face the grave circle; not much is visible from the path but you will see lots of finds from these buildings in the museum). From being accessible to anyone walking up the hill from the surrounding settlement, these important sites of commemoration and ritual now came fully under the control of the palatial authorities, who seem to have been using this incorporation and refurbishment of the burial area of an earlier group of elite Mycenaeans to assert an ancestral connection as a foundation for their own power and status (whether or not the people buried there were in fact their ancestors).

Looking out over the grave circle and the wall, you can see a group of four buildings below the citadel. Known as the ‘Ivory Houses’ because of the large amounts of ivory furniture inlays found there, these buildings functioned as part of the palatial administration, receiving, storing and distributing goods and controlling workers – as is shown by the c.60 Linear B tablets found there (far more than from the citadel itself, where only 12 have been found), as well as items like the ivory inlays and oil jars. These buildings were destroyed about 1300-1250 BCE, 50-100 years earlier than the final destruction of the palace itself; you can see them closer up later in the tour.

Continuing up the hill, you pass through the porch of the palace building proper and then reach the throne room (or ‘megaron’) complex. If this is closed off, as it was when I visited, it can be viewed from the path above. Considered one of the defining features of a Mycenaean palace, this consists of a courtyard leading to a porch with two columns (you can see the bases), then a small anteroom, and then a larger throne-room, with a central hearth surrounded by four columns (here under a protective roof), and the throne against the right-hand wall. The megaron here is right on the edge of the steepest side of the hill – in fact, when it was excavated the far side of the throne room (where we assume the throne was located) had fallen down into the ravine, so that side is reconstructed.

On the way down the other side of the hill, you pass through an area known as the ‘Artisan’s Quarter’, which contained workshops where precious materials such as ivory and semi-precious stones were worked, and reach the north-eastern section of the fortification. This was the very latest addition to the walls, which were extended out in the last phase of construction (c.1250-1200 BCE) to enclose this area and give access to the water cistern further down the slope, via a passage built down through the wall and the hill – apparently ensuring a water supply in case of siege was a concern at this point. You can walk down the first of the three flights of stairs leading to this cistern and admire the corbel vaulting of the roof, a technique allowing massive blocks of stone to be supported which was also used in the tholos tombs you’ll see later.

Following the path back round the other side of the hill, past the north postern gate – constructed out of three massive blocks of stone, like the Lion Gate but without the lions – you leave the citadel and turn right towards the museum (and the toilets and gift shop).

Here you can see many of the finds from the site, including – some of my favourites – these large clay figurines of people and snakes from the Cult Centre (plus, of course, a display of Linear B tablets). As mentioned above, though, you’ll have to go to Athens to see the most famous finds from the Grave Circles (there are some replicas on display here).

Just beyond the museum is one of the new monumental tombs that replaced the Shaft Graves of Grave Circle A as places for elite burials from c.1400 BCE. Known as ‘tholos’ tombs (θόλος in Greek means a round domed building; plural ‘tholoi’), these tombs have a huge domed burial chamber reached by a long entranceway (the ‘dromos’) and a tall doorway made, like the Lion Gate, of huge slabs of stone, with a ‘relieving triangle’ above – an empty space lessening the weight on the lintel stone.

Like the shaft graves, these would have been repeatedly re-used for burials of multiple individuals with rich grave-goods; but as tholos tombs stand out a lot more than shaft graves, even once the entranceway has been filled in, they’ve nearly all been robbed, leaving comparatively few finds for excavators. Nine of these tholoi have been found in the area around Mycenae, of which four are easily visible. This one is known as the Lion Tomb for its proximity to the Lion Gate; walking back up to the entrance path and down the slope on the other site will bring you to two more, called the Tombs of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus after the (in)famous mythical queen of Mycenae (who killed her husband Agamemnon in revenge for his killing of their daughter Iphigenia) and her lover.

Walking a little further past these tholoi will bring you to the Ivory Houses I mentioned earlier. Retracing your steps back to the entrance, stop to admire the view of the citadel, framed between the hills of Profitis Ilias (left) and Zara (right).

After leaving the main site, you can walk or drive a little way back down the road to see one more tholos tomb – the largest at this site, known as the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ after the mythical king of Mycenae, father of Agamemnon. Part of the elaborate decoration of this tomb’s facade, made of carved multi-coloured stone, can be seen in the Mycenaean gallery of the National Archaeological Museum – which, if you haven’t already been, is recommended as your next port of call to see this facade, the Shaft Grave finds, frescos, more Linear B, and lots more!

Practical information

Getting there: Mycenae is about 2 hours’ drive from Athens, half an hour from Nafplio. Buses from Athens for Mycenae actually stop at Fichti, about 3.5km from the archaeological site. For opening hours, see the Ministry of Culture website.

Access: a step-free paved path runs from the entrance all around the citadel (with steep slopes in places), and to the museum (which is step-free, with ramps leading down to/up from galleries). Some areas of the citadel, e.g. the area around Grave Circle A and the cistern, are not accessible via this path and involve steps and/or uneven surfaces. The tholos tombs and Ivory Houses are down a steep slope via a paved path and a few steps, and then over uneven ground. The Treasury of Atreus is accessed via a gravel path which slopes upwards from the car park. NB the site is very exposed with little shade and few places to sit.

Facilities: toilets and a gift shop; the ‘cafe’ referred to by the website is actually a kiosk in the car park (i.e. outside the ticket barriers) selling drinks and snacks. On the fairly hot day in May when I visited, this had run out of still water by mid-afternoon, so I recommend bringing plenty with you (tap water on-site is not drinkable, according to staff). There are tavernas and grocery stores in Mikines village, c.2km down the road.