Burial Customs & the Grave Circles
Burial as a Window onto Mycenaean Society
No source tells us more about Mycenaean values and social structure than the burials. The tombs of Mycenae — their scale, their contents, their architectural sophistication — reveal a society that believed in commemorating the dead with elaborate ceremony and extraordinary wealth. The type of tomb a person received in Mycenaean culture was a direct statement of their status in life. Studying the evolution of burial types from the early shaft graves to the great tholos tombs shows us how Mycenaean society developed over roughly four centuries.
We can distinguish three main types of Mycenaean burial: shaft graves, cist graves, and the later chamber tombs and tholos tombs. Tomb form is evidence to weigh rather than a fixed label: tholos tombs were high-investment and usually elite, but chamber tombs served a wide range of people, and scholars now question treating cist graves as a separate poor class. The great tholos tombs of the 14th and 13th centuries BC belong to the height of Mycenaean power.
The three main types of Mycenaean burial are: cist graves (simple stone-lined boxes in the earth, for ordinary people), shaft graves (rectangular pits lined with stone slabs, for the elite — used in the early period), and tholos and chamber tombs (monumental domed stone structures, for the greatest rulers of the mature Mycenaean period, 14th–13th centuries BC).
Grave Circle A and Grave Circle B
Inside the Lion Gate at Mycenae lies Grave Circle A. This cluster of six shaft graves is enclosed by a double ring of limestone slabs set upright in the ground, creating a clearly defined sacred space. The shafts themselves are rectangular pits, up to about four metres deep, with stone-lined walls and a roof of timber and stone. The dead were placed on the floor of the shaft; in some cases, the bodies were accompanied by multiple individuals buried at different times as the family group grew.
The contents of the graves were astonishing. Schliemann’s team recovered gold death masks, bronze swords and daggers (some with inlaid decoration), amber beads, rock crystal drinking vessels, silver cups, gold drinking cups shaped like animal heads, diadems and gold bands, and in one case the famous inlaid dagger blades discussed in the previous lesson. The quantity and quality of gold in particular was remarkable: Homer’s epithet “Mycenae rich in gold” suddenly seemed less like poetic exaggeration and more like a genuine memory.
Grave Circle A contained gold death masks, inlaid bronze daggers, gold and silver drinking vessels (including rhytons shaped like animal heads), amber jewellery, and rock crystal cups. Together, these objects mark the dead as members of a warrior aristocracy with access to luxury goods from across the Mediterranean world. Grave Circle B, excavated in the 1950s nearby, predates Grave Circle A slightly and contains a wider range of burial types, including some less wealthy graves alongside richly furnished ones.
The Gold Death Mask: The ‘Mask of Agamemnon’
The most famous object from the shaft graves is the Mask of Agamemnon, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. It was found in Shaft Grave V and is hammered from a thin sheet of gold, shaped to the contours of a bearded male face with almond-shaped eyes, a prominent nose, and stylised ears. The mask was placed over the face of the dead man, ensuring his features would be preserved and recognisable — perhaps a belief that the identity of the deceased needed to be maintained in death as well as life.
The mask is not a portrait in the modern sense: it is an idealised representation of a powerful, bearded adult male. Schliemann was so excited by the discovery that he sent a telegram to the Greek king claiming he had looked upon Agamemnon’s face. In reality, the mask dates to around 1550–1500 BC, roughly three centuries before the traditional date of the Trojan War. The man whose face it covered remains unknown. The mask is important not because it shows us Agamemnon but because it demonstrates that Mycenaean rulers were buried with extraordinary material expressions of their status — one possible interpretation is that preserving the appearance of the dead mattered, though the mask alone cannot prove what the Mycenaeans believed.
The romantic identification of the mask with Agamemnon illustrates a wider problem in Mycenaean studies: the temptation to use Homer to interpret the archaeology, and the archaeology to confirm Homer. Schliemann believed that Homer described a real world and went looking for it — which led to genuinely important discoveries, but also to wishful thinking. Modern archaeologists approach the connection between Homer and Mycenae more cautiously. We can say that a wealthy ruler was buried at Mycenae around 1550 BC with a gold mask and exceptional grave goods. We cannot say it was Agamemnon, who — if he existed at all — would have lived around 1250–1200 BC.
Tholos Tombs: The Treasury of Atreus
By the 14th and 13th centuries BC, the shaft graves had given way to a new and far grander tomb type: the tholos or beehive tomb. The most impressive example at Mycenae is the so-called Treasury of Atreus (also known as the Tomb of Agamemnon), built around 1250 BC. It is a magnificent piece of engineering built into a hillside outside the citadel walls.
Approaching the Treasury of Atreus, a visitor walks along a long open entrance passage called the dromos. The Treasury of Atreus has a dromos approximately thirty-six metres long and six metres wide, lined with cut stone masonry. At its end, the doorway is framed by two tapering pilasters of a green marble-like stone decorated with running spirals and other carved patterns. The lintel above the door consists of two enormous stone blocks, the inner one estimated at over one hundred tonnes in weight.
Passing through the doorway, the visitor enters the circular burial chamber. The chamber is roughly fourteen metres in diameter and thirteen metres high. The walls are built of horizontal stone courses, each one projecting slightly inward over the last until they meet at the apex — the same corbelling technique used in the galleries at Tiryns. The resulting shape resembles a beehive from inside. When the tomb was intact, the stone courses were finished smooth; holes in the walls suggest that bronze rosettes and other decorative fittings were once attached. The side chamber, reached through a small doorway in the right wall, probably held the actual burial — though the tomb was robbed in antiquity and its contents are unknown.
The tholos tombs and the shaft graves together chart the trajectory of Mycenaean power. The shaft graves of Grave Circles A and B (c.1600–1500 BC) show early Mycenaean rulers accumulating wealth and displaying it in death. The great tholos tombs of the 14th and 13th centuries BC — the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae and the tholos tomb at Tiryns are among the finest — show a later Mycenaean elite with the organisational capacity to construct massive architectural monuments requiring the movement of enormous stone blocks and the labour of many workers over a prolonged period. The monumental scale of the tholos tombs suggests that rulers of the mature Mycenaean period commanded resources and authority far exceeding those of the early shaft-grave kings.