Mycenæan Origins and Chronology

Abstract

THE beehive tomb or tholos at Mycenas known as the “Treasury of Atreus” is one of the most important monuments of the Bronze Age in Greece, and the finest example extant of Mycenæan architecture. Its significance in the reconstruction of the course of development of the early civilization of the eastern Mediterranean was further emphasized when Sir Arthur Evans, on the evidence of a beehive tomb then recently discovered in Crete, attributed the Treasury of Atreus to a Minoan derivation, assigning it to an earlier date than that generally accepted and making it the archetype of which other and inferior beehive structures at Mycenæ were degenerating derivatives. This conclusion ran counter in particular to the results of excavations in the dromos, the walled passage approach to the Treasury, carried out by the British School of Archæology at Athens in 1920–23. On general grounds and in view of their numerical distribution, the beehive tombs might well be, it seemed, a product of the Mainland or Mycenæan civilization, while the excavations pointed to a date not later than 1350 B.C. This date harmonized with a logical and natural evolution in architectural development which emerged from study of the three groups of beehive tombs.