Normally, ceramics found in such burials help archaeologists calculate its age, but this burial contained no ceramic material at all. The team set about trying to place as precise a date as possible on the grave and its contents. The burial reveals that, contrary to descriptions of funeral rites in The Iliadand The Odyssey, Mycenaean funerary practices in that period consisted of burial, not cremation. Wrapped in a shroud, the body was laid inside a wooden sarcophagus. The causes of his death are unclear because of the poor state of the body. Historians anticipated additional finds to reveal more about this earlier Mycenaean phase, but no major discoveries were made for decades.Īlthough the investigation is far from complete, initial analyses have determined that the Griffin Warrior was a man in his early 30s who stood somewhere between five and six feet tall. It predated the construction of the palace by about 200 years. Northeast of the palace, a beehive-shaped tomb, known as a tholos, had been found in the 1930s. The archaeologists confirmed that the Palace of Nestor coincided with the flourishing of the Mycenaean age, around 1300 B.C.Ĭlose to the palace on the hillsides, other discoveries indicated evidence of an older phase. A throne room, baths, and warehouses were revealed, reflecting the multifunctional nature of Mycenaean palaces: a royal mansion combined with a religious centre and storehouses to distribute harvests from the region it controlled. The excavation continued for 15 consecutive seasons and brought to light the best-preserved palace from the entire Aegean Bronze Age. World War II halted work on the site, which did not resume until 1952. It soon emerged that the ruins were Mycenaean, and in honour of Pylos’s Homeric associations, the site was named the Palace of Nestor. In 1939 a team led by Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati uncovered the ruins of a palace northeast of modern Pylos. In The Odyssey Nestor welcomes to Pylos the son of Odysseus, who is looking for his father, missing since the Greek victory over Troy. An old man when he took part in the Trojan War, Nestor was one of the luckier Greeks, who managed to return home and resume his life. In The Iliad “sandy Pylos” was the palatial home of Nestor, a Greek warrior-king. Homeric parallels are inescapable when it comes to Pylos, located on the Peloponnese’s western shore. The gruelling Peloponnesian War ended Athens’s brief golden age and profoundly shaped its great tragedians and thinkers. The peninsula was home to Sparta, a key player in the defeat of the Persian Empire in the fifth century B.C., which then took up arms against its former ally, Athens. The names of its cities and regions-Arcadia, Olympia, Argolis, Corinth-ring out in great myths, legends, poems, and plays.
Facts and fictionsĪ land of mountains and rugged coasts, the Peloponnese is a place where history and legend are sometimes difficult to separate. It surely promised to deliver new insights into ancient Greece. When the intact warrior’s tomb was uncovered in 2015, experts were surprised and delighted with the discovery.
The area had been well excavated in the 20th century, leading many to believe there was little left to discover. The Griffin Warrior’s tomb is located near Pylos in the Peloponnesian peninsula in southern Greece. An olive grove in Southern Greece was the scene of a spectacular discovery in May 2015 when archaeologists discovered the tomb of a man they dubbed the “Griffin Warrior.” Crammed with artefacts, the grave offers up new insights into the origins of the Mycenaean culture whose mythical heroes starred in the Trojan War.
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