User:Ezafft1/Treasury of Atreus

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The Treasury of Atreus or Tomb of Agamemnon is a large tholos or beehive tomb constructed between 1350 and 1250 BC in Mycenae, Greece. The tomb was used for an unknown period. Mentioned by the Roman geographer Pausanias in the 2nd century AD, it was still visible in 1879 when the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered the shaft graves under the "agora" in the Acropolis at Mycenae. The tomb perhaps held the remains of the sovereign who completed the reconstruction of the fortress or one of his successors. The grave is an exceptional example of Bronze Age Mycenaean tholoi and architecture as it is considered the finest and largest of the surviving nine tholos tombs found at Mycenae and the many more in the Argolid.

The Treasury of Atreus exemplifies aspects of architectural form and technical construction used in Bronze Age Mycenean culture. The tomb is a funerary chamber constructed within the slop of a hill once surrounded by Mycenaean citadels, it is structurally complex, and its monumental shape and grandeur make it one of the most impressive Mycenaean monuments.

Background
Mycenae, ruled by Greek kings Atreus and Agamemnon, was an important and powerful society during the Bronze Age in Greece. The ancient city of Mycenae was located on the Argive Plain in northeastern Peloponnese Greece. The Mycenae acropolis was built on a hill hundreds of meters above sea level, fortified by the surrounding environment. Specifically, the Mycenae was fortified by the hills and peaks of the Mount Profitis Ilias and Mount Zara toward the southeast. Additionally, the acropolis was separated from these peaks by two ravines, the northern Kokoretsa and the southern Chavos. The Chavos closely intersects Mycenae, Mount Zara and the Panagia ridge.

Location
The Panagia ridge divides Mycenae’s nine tombs into two groups. The tholoi on the east side of the ridge are thought to have been built by the Mycenaean rulers, as they are located closer to the acropolis, and are larger and more ornate than those on the western side. In order of construction, the eastern tombs are the Treasury of Atreus, the Tomb of Aegisthus, the Lion Tomb, and the Tomb of Clytemnestra. The other five tombs, the tombs of aristocracy, are located on the west side of the Panagia ridge.

The Tomb of Aegisthus, the Lion Tomb, and the Tomb of Clytemnestra were built close together near the acropolis. The Treasury of Atreus, however, is set alone at the southern edge of a bowl on the Panagia ridge’s eastern slope. Although the reasoning for the distinct placement of the Treasury of Atreus is unknown, its difference in location and bolstering features which undermine the rest, make this tholos unique and highlight the special status of the ruler who constructed the tomb.

Construction
Mycenaean tholoi generally consist of a subterranean funerary chamber with corbelled roofing. Thus, tholi construction combined excavation works, complex masonry works, and mound placement. The foundation and floor of these tombs required excavating a large, cylindrical cavity out of the bedrock or hillside for which the masonry chamber and ogee corbelled dome could then be constructed within. Inside, tiers of ashlar masonry were laid in rings so that each successive tier projected slightly farther inward, until only a small opening is left at the top. Following the tombs’ construction, the masonry work was then covered by a mound of earth projecting above the sloping landscape of the hillside. As a result of the emplacement of an earth mount, the chamber’s masonry works can only be seen from the inside.

The Treasury of Atreus is rather atypical compared to the majority of ancient tholoi. The Treasury features unique masonry construction with a long, heavy lintel placed below a relieving triangle designed to direct the weight of the masonry away from the lintel and avoid breakage. The tomb was the tallest and widest dome in the world for over a thousand years until construction of the Temple of Mercury in Baiae and the Pantheon in Rome.

Structure
The Treasury of Atreus, like other Mycenae tholoi tombs, features a dromos, or long straight ceremonial passage, set within the sloping landscape. The dromos leads into the tomb’s enormous façade, where the inner funerary chamber can then be entered through a stomion, or deeply set doorway.

The entrance to the tomb is oriented east-west and is characterized by an uncovered, inclined passage, or dromos, 6 meters wide and 36 meters long with conglomerate stone walls on either side. The dromos walls are about 19 meters long and 10 meters high at the façade, built in ashlar, or cut and worked stone. The ashlar walls are supported by blocks of conglomerate and limestone bonded by yellow clay, a mortar commonly used by Mycenaeans. The thickness of the walls increases from 0.5 meters at the eastern entrance to 10 meters at the western entrance nearest to the façade to support the pressure from the thrust of the façade itself and the pressure from the earth behind. The cubic content of the ashlar masonry used to construct the tombs’ entrance passage is at least 600 cubic meters, weighing around 1,200 tons.

The façade at the western end of the dromos is 10.5 meters high, cut by a 2.7 meter wide and 5.4-meter-high doorway. The stomion, or doorway, is 5.40 meters deep, covered with two massive horizontal beams, or lintels. The inner lintel is the heaviest block ever used in Greek architecture, weighing around 120 tons and measuring to 8 meters long, 5 meters wide, and 1.2 meters thick. Above the entryway there is an open space in the shape of a triangle. This space, which is known as a relieving triangle, is meant to funnel the weight of the structure off the lintel and into the sides of the structure, preventing the lintel from breaking due to pressure. Great care was taken in the positioning of the enormous stones, to guarantee the vault's stability over time in bearing the force of compression from its own weight. This gave a perfectly smoothed internal surface, onto which could be placed gold, silver and bronze decoration. The entrance portal to the tumulus was richly decorated: half-columns in green limestone with zig-zag motifs on the shaft, a frieze with rosettes above the architrave of the door, and spiral decoration in bands of red marble that closed the triangular aperture above an architrave. Segments of the columns and architraves were removed, some would rather say stolen, by Lord Elgin in the early nineteenth century and are now in the British Museum. The capitals are influenced by ancient Egyptian examples; one is in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin as part of the Antikensammlung Berlin. Other decorative elements were inlaid with rosso antico marble from quarries on the Mani peninsula, which had produced a fine red marble since between 1700-1300 BC, later known as lapis Taenarius after Cape Taenarum, and green alabaster. The tholos chamber, constructed with fitted ashlar blocks in the shape of a beehive, is 14.5 meters in diameter and 13.2 meters high. A 2.5-meter-high doorway on the northern side of the inner chamber leads into a 6-meter square side chamber.