The gold mask of Mycenae

The story

A man obsessed with Homer

Heinrich Schliemann was born in Germany in 1822, into a modest family, and as a young man worked as a shop boy and as a cabin boy on a ship. Then, through hard work and study, he became a rich merchant: first in St Petersburg, in Russia, then all over the world, among other things trading in gold dust in California in 1851. He learned languages with a speed that amazed his contemporaries: he said he could learn one in about six weeks, and by the end of his life he spoke, besides German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Latin and Arabic.

He was passionate about the poems of Homer and believed that Troy, Mycenae and King Agamemnon had really existed. With his earnings he retired from business and devoted himself to archaeology. In 1870 he began to dig in the hill of Hissarlik, in Turkey, where the amateur archaeologist Frank Calvert thought Troy lay. In 1873, the evening before stopping work, he found a treasure of gold, which he named “Priam's Treasure”. In 1876 he moved on to Mycenae.

The dig at Mycenae

Mycenae is a small town in Greece, in the Peloponnese, dominated by a fortress built on top of a hill. Homer remembers it as the city of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War. To get permission to dig, Schliemann had to accept that a Greek archaeologist, Panagiotis Stamatakis, would work alongside him, appointed by the Greek Archaeological Society to supervise the work.

Inside the walls, near the great gate, Schliemann found a circular enclosure of stone slabs, now called Grave Circle A. Beneath the ground there were deep tombs, dug like wells into the earth and called “shaft graves”. The dead were accompanied by weapons and precious objects. On some faces the dead wore gold masks. The most famous was found in Grave V.

The mask

The mask is made from a single sheet of gold hammered over a wooden form; then the details, such as the eyebrows, eyes, moustache and beard, were engraved. It shows a serious face with very strong features. The story goes that Schliemann sent a telegram to the King of Greece, George I, with the words “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon”. The sentence is reported, but historians regard it as an attributed quotation, not a certain one.

It was enthusiasm with no basis. Today we know that the mask dates from the 16th century BC, that is, three or four hundred years before the Trojan War, which, if it happened, belongs around 1200 BC. The man buried there could not have been Agamemnon, and in fact we do not know who he was. The name “Mask of Agamemnon” has stayed only out of habit.

Doubts and criticism

Some scholars have even doubted the authenticity of the mask. Two researchers, William Calder III and David Traill, argued that it might not be ancient, recalling that Schliemann was in some cases accused of adding objects to his digs and that the mask is different from the others. Most archaeologists disagree, however: the work was watched by witnesses, other masks were found in the same dig, and the workmanship has similarities with objects that are certainly ancient, such as a gold rhyton in the shape of a lion's head.

Judgement on Schliemann too is complex. He was a brilliant and tenacious man, but also vain and not very rigorous. He admitted that he had invented the story of his wife Sophia carrying the treasure away at Troy in her shawl: at that moment she was in Athens. His methods were called “brutal”: at Troy he dug so deep that he destroyed important layers, and he did not take enough notes. Another archaeologist, Carl Blegen, defended him by pointing out that the science of excavation did not yet exist in 1876. With his collaborator Wilhelm Dörpfeld, Schliemann went on to dig at Tiryns and again at Troy, and he died in Naples in December 1890.

Who were the lords of the tombs?

The tombs of Grave Circle A belong to the first kings of whom we have any trace on mainland Greece, perhaps a dynasty of warriors and chiefs. In the tombs there were weapons and luxury objects: a sign of a society led by warriors, used to war and in contact with distant lands. Grave Circle A lies inside the walls of the citadel, near the Lion Gate, which we discuss in another card.