our third and final pre-greek culture we're going to talk about the Mycenaeans so we talked about the minions on Crete the Cycladic sand the Cyclopes and now we're going to Mycenae which is right here on the lower Peloponnese so Peloponnese that refers to this portion of greece we've got the Greek mainland too don't we and so keep in mind how close these guys are how close these guys are to the larger mainland as that is an important part of the story this group flourishes from 1602 about 100 BCE and they were in constant warfare with each other with groups on the mainland with with the Minoans and anybody else we know that they specialized in lavish displays of power and wealth especially in their architecture and this is the area that was improperly excavated in the mid-1800s and that is part of the problem with us trying to figure out what's what because there was not a scientific excavation going on there the big thing to remember is that these guys are not an island culture and they must have fortification in order to protect themselves from the various invaders who were in the way and so this is why we begin our conversation by looking at this structure referred to as the Lions Gate this is obviously an old photograph taken at the time of Schliemann this metal is obviously added it's not original but what is are these huge walls known as cyclope masonry as in Cyclops as in really big you can see they're huge they you can see that it's still in pretty good condition you notice post and lintel construction and up above is a relieving triangle remember those from looking at the Egyptian pyramids and in that triangle are two beautiful confronting lioness says now you notice that their heads are gone that's to drag and there is a Aegean column in the center-right wider at the top narrower at the bottom with a cushion capital and so this beautiful stone sculpture survives in this area that was meant as a point of access so let's take a look over here first and look at the fortified complex of the Mycenaeans you can see that it is a walled structure they don't have to have the walls in canosa's do they because they've got the ocean to protect them but here it they're constantly under threat from invasion and so the palace is up in the center and if you wanted to get in and not climb the walls you had to go through this gate and this gate is this gate you're like so what what's the big deal well here's the big deal in the ancient pre Greek world this is how the army moved forward they created this entity called a phalanx where they would interlock their shields with their non-dominant hand and hold their weapon in their dominant hand and they would just plow forward kind of like this giant machine and it made it very difficult to break up now that's fine if you're on an open battlefield but what happens if you are marching marching marching marching and then suddenly you've got to cut your phalanx down enough to get through that doorway it's going to cause a break and the phalanx and you know what else can happen is people can stand up here and throw stuff at you and pour things on you so this is how the environment is gonna drive architecture which in turn is going to impact art making the palace structure then is set on this hill but another thing that we want to take a good look at here is the burial format because this is something we're going to see evolve in both the Greeks and the Roman culture this is called the treasury of atreus because of all the cool stuff that would have been in there it also has the unfortunate nickname of the tomb of agamemnon now one of the problems is that we don't know if agamemnon really existed or not but excavator Schliemann was convinced that he did and was convinced that this is where he was from and that this was his burial you can see that we've got a tholos or round tomb structure that it blends in with the hillside we've got a processional walkway and you can see it's quite large as 43 feet high from the top to the bottom here's somebody staying there so you get a sense of the scale we've got post and lintel construction with a relieving triangle over the doorway ah once the deceased was placed inside then the doorway would have been sealed up and all the treasures would have stayed haha well we know how how that appears so it's just going to look like a hill once it's closed up and this walkway would have been filled in remember the human obsession dressing up lining up and processing this place is made for that this is a nice cutaway showing what it would have looked like underground and then here is a photographer standing inside this structure was brightly painted so there's a lot that we don't know because of the paint loss and there wasn't a lot of treasures left once this was opened up so it had been raided so we really are interested in this sort of a beehive stacking of the stones as a way to support the weight of that roof and speaking of someone who we don't know if they exist or not let's take a look at this beautiful gold rep who's a mass so the technique is gold repousse a rep who say it's a French word it means you've got a big sheet of gold and you're gonna press and pound the design out these were actually over the face of the deceased and there are many of these that have been discovered so there's nothing on this marking it to affiliate it with Agamemnon but it just has this unfortunate nickname it's about 12 inches across and it dates to about 1600 BCE notice the stylized Scrolls four ears a a mature face not an idealized youthful face certainly the craftsmanship here is not equal to the Egyptian neighbors across the Mediterranean and that is in part because they just didn't have any experience with the medium of gold like the ancient Egyptians did so placed over the face of the deceased who does it belong to we don't know but we're stuck with this unfortunate name and a final image to make the point about people who live in land and people who live at the sea I showed you the wonderful marine style octopus vases from the Minoan culture and here's how their inland cousins treated the same subject matter was this made by an artist who saw octopi every day I don't think so it's still hilarious and a lot of fun and a wonderful piece but it shows you how important the environment is in the development of art about 1200 BCE Mycenae Falls and the culture enters what is called the quote/unquote Dark Ages of Greece it could have been due to earthquake volcanic activity tsunami we know that this is a time of climate change invasion and plague the palaces were destroyed there were shortages of essential goods troop movement indicated that there's some kind of internal insurrection this linear a and B the writing format doesn't really help us with much and there is a big loss of what literary evidence we did have with leaving us with just a very few examples but now we are set to begin our study of ancient Greece