The Lion Gate at Mycenae

The story

The kings' entrance

Imagine you are a traveller of three thousand two hundred years ago, arriving on foot at the city of Mycenae, in the Peloponnese. From far away you see a hill with a fortress on top. Then you come closer and the walls become very tall and made of blocks so big that they seem impossible to move. Following the slope you reach a gap a little over three metres wide, closed at the top by an enormous stone. Above that stone there is a sculpture: two lionesses standing, facing each other, with their front paws resting on a column. This is the Lion Gate, the main entrance to the citadel of Mycenae.

What it is like

The gate was built around 1250 BC, in the middle of the 13th century BC, in the period archaeologists call Late Helladic IIIB. It lies on the north-west side of the hill. The gap is about 3.10 metres wide and about 2.95 metres high. On top, covering the passage, is a lintel made of a single block of stone 4.5 metres long, 2 metres high and 0.8 thick. Beside the gate the walls form a bastion, that is, a projecting part, almost fifteen metres long.

The walls of the entrance and of the bastion are built of conglomerate blocks, a rock made of pebbles cemented together. The stones are carefully squared and laid in regular rows. The relief with the lions, on the other hand, is carved on a slab of limestone placed above the lintel.

The lions

The two beasts rest their front paws on a base, and between them stands a column. One thing strikes you at once: the heads are missing. The animals' heads had been made separately, perhaps in another material, and fitted into the relief; over time they were lost and only the necks remain. For this reason some scholars wonder whether they were sphinxes or animals of another kind, although most still read them as two lionesses. The meaning is debated. The column may represent the king's house, or a deity, and the lions its guardians. Some scholars have linked the lions to the goddess Hera, but these are only hypotheses.

It is the largest monumental sculpture left from the Greek Bronze Age, and it is the only large Mycenaean sculpture to survive. Of the rest of that world we mostly have small objects, such as weapons, vases and jewellery, or paintings on walls.

The walls of the Cyclopes

The gate is part of a stretch of wall built when the citadel was extended for the second time, in the 13th century BC. The blocks of the wall are so enormous that the Greeks of later centuries, seeing them, could not imagine that men had lifted them. According to their tradition, they had been built by the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants. Even today archaeologists use the expression “Cyclopean walls” for this type of construction, made of very large blocks, little or not at all finished.

A gate never forgotten

In the 2nd century AD the Greek traveller Pausanias visited Mycenae, saw the gate still standing and described it in his travel book. This is why, when scholars came back to look for it in the 18th century, they had a clue. In 1700 Francesco Grimani surveyed the site with Pausanias as his guide and recognised the gate as the one in the account. In 1840 the Greek Archaeological Society began to clear it of earth and rubble. In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann dug the ground south of the gate and found the royal tombs with their gold. Since then the Lion Gate has been the most recognisable image of Mycenae.

The end of Mycenae

Around 1200 BC in the eastern Mediterranean many cities and palaces were destroyed or abandoned: this is the crisis discussed in the card on the end of the Bronze Age. The Mycenaean palaces did not survive; some earthquakes had already damaged Mycenae around 1250 BC and Tiryns around 1200 BC, but scholars now think they were not the main cause. The gate, in any case, stayed where it was, among the ruins, and went on being seen by those who passed by.