(piano music)
Voiceover: Just down the hill from Mycenae
the great Citadel of the Mycenaeans.
The Bronze Age Greek mainland people
that traded as far away
as Italy and north Africa.
There is, in a hill, an enormous tomb
which is sometimes known
as the Treasury of Atreus.
Voiceover: Or the tomb of Agamemnon.
Voiceover: The type of tomb that we're looking at
is called a tholos or a beehive tomb.
And this is one of two types of tombs at Mycenae.
These are the larger of the two types.
The other are shaft graves within a larger circle.
But the tholos are truly monumental
and this is the largest of them all.
Voiceover: And these date to a slightly
later period of Mycenaean history
and they are clearly expressions
of power the ruling elite were buried in tholos tombs.
Voiceover: We're going to walk in, walking along
a passageway that's built into the side
of the hill with huge blocks of stone
that have been cut quite finely
and fit together very closely.
Some of the stones are just of such a large scale
that it's hard to imagine people
being able to move them.
Voiceover: Right now it looks very spare
but this had carvings ...
Voiceover: It may have had relief sculpture.
And there was also finer kinds
of more decorative stone.
Okay, I can't wait.
Let's go in.
We're now entering the dromos
which is the entrance pathway.
(stones crunching underfoot)
Voiceover: The walls on either side rise above us
giving an unmistakable impression
of a grand monumental space.
Voiceover: It's ceremonial and it feels
as if we are entering the earth.
There's a slight grade upward.
Voiceover: The entranceway, it tapers inward
as it moves up.
Look at that deep and heavy lintel stone
that moves back through that doorway.
Voiceover: It's made out of two pieces
and we estimate that it weighs over 100 tons.
Voiceover: So the kind of vaulting that we see above
the lintel is called corbeling.
Where the stones are cut and placed so
that each one, as it moves up, moves slightly inward,
creating this triangular space above the lintel
known as the relieving triangle.
The Lion Gate in Mycenae, that space is filled
with a relief sculpture.
Voiceover: We don't think this was, but again,
there were complex stones that would have faced
this rougher masonry and we know that at least
some of it was imported from Egypt.
Voiceover: Right.
There were columns on either side
that were decorated.
Some of these are located now in
the Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Voiceover: And there were very complex patterns.
There were zig-zags, there were spirals ...
Voiceover: Chevrons.
Voiceover: It was a really ornate space.
An enormous amount of treasure
was expended to make this.
Voiceover: And we know that the Mycenaean people
buried considerable treasure with their dead.
These tombs, though, have been robbed.
Voiceover: We're now at the threshold
and we can feel the coolness of the interior space.
It's empty, it's dark, and it's massive.
Voiceover: And it's long.
This entryway is 10 or 15 feet deep.
Voiceover: As we enter into the domical space itself,
we are in a round chamber, which beside
the entranceway and the actual burial chamber
to the right, is completely circular.
Some architectural historians have hypothesized
that there may have been
carved bulls around the bottom,
but it rises to an enormous height above us.
Voiceover: So this is a real engineering achievement
to create a domical-vaulted space
this high and this wide.
This is not Post and Lintel archetecture
but the creating of round, arched spaces.
Voiceover: In fact, this will be the largest
domical space until the Pantheon in Rome.
Voiceover: More than 1,000 years later.
Voiceover: And it it is using that corbeling technique.
So each of these stones pushes inward
at ever-so-slightly and is cut at an angle
so that you have this smooth transition
up to the apex with a cap stone.
The width and height of the space are almost equal.
and so there really is a sense of perfection here.
A sense of the ideal.
Voiceover: It's obvious that this circular space,
this enormous vault has symbolic meaning
for the powerful person who is buried here.
(piano music)