Treasury of Atreus
The Treasury of Atreus or Tomb of Agamemnon is a large tholos or beehive tomb constructed between 1300 and 1250 BCE in Mycenae, Greece.
It is the largest and most elaborate tholos tomb known to have been constructed in the Aegean Bronze Age, and one of the last to have been built in the Argolid. The main tomb consisted of a circular burial chamber, or thalamos, topped with a corbelled dome. This dome was the largest in the world until the Roman period, and remains the world's largest corbelled dome. Originally, the façade was decorated with marble columns and sculptures, which used marble from the Mani Peninsula in the southern Peloponnese. Its artwork has been suggested to have been inspired by that of Minoan Crete and of Ancient Egypt.
Little is known of the persons who might have been buried in the tomb: the identification with the mythical Atreus and Agamemnon likely dates to the 18th century. The immense labour involved in the construction of the tomb, as well as the similarities between the architecture of the tholos and the structures of the citadel of Mycenae, has led to suggestions that it may have been intended for a ruler of Mycenae, and represent Mycenae's increasingly dominant status in the later part of the Bronze Age.
The tomb was first excavated in the 19thcentury, when parts of the marble sculptures of its façade were removed by the British aristocrat Lord Elgin and the Ottoman governor Veli Pasha. It was partly excavated by Heinrich Schliemann, and more fully by Panagiotis Stamatakis, in the 1870s. Throughout the 20th century, the British School at Athens made a series of excavations in and around the tomb, led by Alan Wace, which primarily aimed to settle the difficult question of the date of its construction.
Name
Mythology
In Greek mythology, Atreus was the son of Hippodamia and Pelops, the king of Pisa in the western Peloponnese. In the version of the myth recounted by Hyginus, Atreus and his brother Thyestes killed their half-brother Chrysippus by casting him into a well out of jealousy, urged on by their mother. As a punishment for their crime, they were banished to Mycenae, where Hippodamia is variously said to have died by suicide or further exiled herself to Midea.Atreus and Thyestes quarrelled for the throne of Mycenae: first, Thyestes gained it after Atreus' wife, Aerope, gave a golden lamb from Atreus' flock to Thyestes and then tricked him into agreeing that whoever held the lamb should become king. Atreus in turn managed to regain the throne after Hermes persuaded Thyestes to hand the kingship to Atreus if the sun were to rise in the west and set in the east, and then Helios altered the usual course of the sun so that it did exactly that. Finally, Atreus banished Thyestes after tricking him into eating the flesh of his own sons.
On the advice of an oracle, Thyestes had a son by his daughter, Pelopia, as it was foretold that this son would kill Atreus. When the infant, Aegisthus, was born, his mother abandoned him, but he was found by a shepherd and given to Atreus to raise; when Aegisthus entered adulthood, Thyestes revealed the truth of his parentage. Aegisthus killed Atreus and ruled Mycenae jointly with Thyestes.
The heroes Agamemnon and Menelaus were the twin sons of Atreus, sometimes known as the Atreides in Greek literature. After their father's murder, they took refuge with Tyndareus, king of Sparta: later, with Menelaus' assistance, Agamemnon overthrew Aegisthus and Thyestes and became king of Mycenae. However, Aegisthus would, along with Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra, kill Agamemnon on his return from the Trojan War, before being himself killed by Agamemnon's son, Orestes.
Modern name
The precise origin of the name is uncertain, but it probably dates to the 18th century. The tomb was visible in Antiquity, but not associated with Atreus or Agamemnon when Pausanias visited in the 2nd century CE, since he describes the graves of both rulers as being within the walls of Mycenae. After Pausanias, there are no documented accounts of travellers visiting Mycenae until 1700, when the Venetian engineer and surveyor Francesco Vandeyk identified both the Lion Gate and the tomb now known as the 'Treasury of Atreus', which he conjectured was the tomb of a king. Claude-Louis Fourmont, who visited Mycenae in 1729–1730, used the name 'Tomb of Atreus' for the monument: by the time Edward Daniel Clarke visited at the beginning of the 19th century, he could report a tradition that the tomb was known as 'Treasury of Atreus' and identified with the tomb of Agamemnon mentioned in Pausanias.The nearby tombs known as the Tomb of Clytemnestra and Tomb of Aegisthus are so named by association with the Treasury of Atreus.
Construction
The Treasury of Atreus is the largest and most elaborate of the known Mycenaean tholos tombs. It follows the typical tripartite division of these tombs into a narrow rectangular passageway, joined by a deep doorway to a burial chamber surmounted by a corbelled dome. The dome was covered with earth to heighten it; some of this mound remains, but erosion has reduced its height and moved its apex towards the west.The dromos of the tomb is oriented east-west and is 36m long by 6m wide. For the first 19 metres from the stomion, the sides are dressed with conglomerate stone walls: while the dromoi of earlier tombs had been lined with rubble or poros ashlar, the Treasury of Atreus is the first tomb at Mycenae to be fully lined with conglomerate. The source of this conglomerate is likely to have been local to Mycenae. Wace estimates the total volume of masonry in the dromos at over 600 m3, or a weight of over 1200 tons. The height of the walls increases from 0.5m at the eastern end to 10m at the façade; their thickness correspondingly increases from around 2m at the eastern entrance to around 3m at the western entrance nearest to the façade, reflecting the additional pressure of the earth behind the walls as well as from the façade they support. The ashlar walls are bonded by yellow 'Plesia' clay, a mortar commonly used in Mycenaean architecture.
| Period | Approximate Date |
| Middle Helladic III | c.1700–c.1600 BCE |
| Late Helladic I | c.1600–c.1450 BCE |
| Late Helladic II | c.1450–c.1400 BCE |
| Late Helladic IIIA | c.1400–c.1300 BCE |
| Late Helladic IIIB | c.1300–c.1180 BCE |
| Late Helladic IIIC | c.1180–c.1050 BCE |
The façade of the stomion is 10.5m high, with a doorway 5.4m high, 2.7m wide and 5.4m deep. On top of this doorway are two lintel blocks, the innermost of which is 8m in length, 5m in width and 1.2m thick: with a weight of around 120 tons, it is the heaviest single piece of masonry known from Greek architecture and may have required up to 1,000 people to transport it to the tomb. Above the doorway is a 'relieving triangle', an innovation first used at Mycenae on the earlier Tomb of Aegisthus to reduce the stress placed upon the lintel. This triangle is believed to have originally been decorated with sculpture. It has been suggested that the scale of the relieving triangle was intended to symbolise the power to harness resources.
Due to the fragmentary and scattered nature of the remains, there are various reconstructions of the decoration of the façade. The door was flanked by semi-engaged columns in green marble, with zig-zag motifs on the shaft. Two smaller half-columns were placed on either side of the relieving triangle, while red marble was used to create a frieze with rosettes above the architrave of the door, and spiral decoration in bands of red marble that closed the triangular aperture. In the 1960s, Richard Hope Simpson, along with Reynold Higgins and S.E. Ellis, demonstrated that the red marble, known as rosso antico, came from quarries on the Mani peninsula, and suggested that it was 'highly probable' that the green marble traced to the same source. This red marble was later known as lapis Taenarius after Cape Taenarum. Two reliefs in gypsum, carved with the image of bulls, may have decorated either the façade or the side chamber. The empty 'relieving triangle' above the lintel of the façade served to direct the weight of the dome away from the centre of the lintel, reducing the stress placed upon it. Christos Tsountas suggested that the façade may have included an alabaster cornice, since fragments of a similar structure were found in the Tomb of Clytemnestra, which he believed to be contemporary with 'Atreus': however, recent re-evaluation of the Tomb of Clytemnestra has suggested that it may have been built up to two centuries later, making this suggestion hypothetical at best.
The thalamos is made up of 33 courses of ashlar masonry, 14.5m in diameter and 13.2m high. It was initially constructed by the excavation of a cylindrical cavity from the hillside, which was then built up with masonry into a corbelled dome. Traces of nails hammered into the interior have been recovered, which have been interpreted as evidence for decorations, perhaps golden rosettes, once hung from the inside dome. A 2.5-meter-high doorway on the northern side of the inner chamber leads into a 6-meter square side chamber: along with the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenos in Boeotia, which appears to be built to the same plan, the Treasury of Atreus is the only known Mycenaean tholos with a side chamber. Most scholars consider this to have been the location of any burials that were made inside the tomb, though no direct evidence of such burials has survived; Alan Wace, however, believed that it was used as an ossuary to which the remains of previous burials were relocated while further interments were made in the main thalamos. The tomb was the tallest and widest stone dome in the world for over a thousand years, until the Roman period, which saw the construction of the “Temple of Mercury” at Baiae in the late 1st century BCE or early 1st century CE and of the Pantheon in Rome in the 2nd century CE. Both of these are "true" domes, as opposed to corbelled domes, making the Treasury of Atreus the world's largest corbelled dome.
The earthen tumulus above the tomb was originally supported by a retaining wall of poros stone, which is preserved to a height of 1.5m and a thickness of around 1m. It is believed that this poros stone was quarried in the hills north-west of Mycenae, in the direction of Nemea. A terrace, approximately 27m in both length and breadth, was constructed in front of the tomb.
James Wright has described the construction of tholos tombs as a 'monumental expression of power', and highlighted the connections between the architecture of the tomb and that of the broadly-contemporary fortifications and palace on the acropolis. In particular, Wright draws attention to the resemblance between the relieving triangle and the sculpted relief of the Lion Gate, and the heavy use of conglomerate on the tomb, which is used within the citadel to accentuate key architectural features, particularly column and anta bases, thresholds and door jambs. It has also been suggested that the tapering sides and inward slant of the doorway may have been inspired by Ancient Egyptian architecture, while the running-spiral motif on the upper half-columns may trace back to Minoan art.
Little is known about the organisation of the tomb's construction or the workers who built it. Elizabeth French has suggested that the same workforce who constructed the LH III megaron on the acropolis may subsequently have been used to construct the Treasury of Atreus, and that they may have been worked as part of a corvée system. It has been calculated that the construction of the tomb required at least 20,000 worker-days of labour, and estimated that it may have occupied up to 1600 people and been a years- or decades-long project.
Nothing is known of who might have been buried inside the tomb, though it is generally considered to have been an elite or royal figure, perhaps a ruler of the site or somebody close to its rulers.