Mycenae

This is me with the original Death Mask of Agamemnon found at Mycenae where we went today.

It was so great talking to/seeing everyone last night! I hope you guys enjoyed the rest of your day and that MC did well at the swim meet. After we finished that Andrew came over, we fed him dinner, and we hung out and just caught up some more. Then we headed to Mao just for about an hour for drinks.

This morning we left at 6:30 for our Peloponnese trip, our first stop was Mycenae. It was cool! We explored the many tombs found there, hiked up to the settlement, and climbed down into the ground through this passage way that was used as a water cistern. Everything was pretty well preserved but the tombs smelled very musty so that was unpleasant.

Mycenae is sort of in the middle of nowhere so we had to walk along this road to get there but it was enjoyable. When we went down to explore the underground cistern we each got a candle to use as light because it was so dark. It was cool going down there but that smelled too and there were little bugs everywhere that were attracted to the light. It was gross.

We saw the liongate and the two grave circles where the vast amount of gold and other treasure was found. The history of the dig there is filled with controversy and I find it very interesting. The site was first found by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876-1877.

Many things about this dig were questionable including:
-he was not a trained archeologist and made many mistakes on his excavations
-he married a Greek woman whose parents worked with gold
-the death mask of agamemmnon he found do not look like any other of the masks and it looks a lot like him, including the mustache
-he failed to report his finding of the agamemnon mask until months later
-there is no way to date gold, only pottery which he did not do correctly

There are many other things that are questionable about his doings, also some interesting things about his character. He was crazy. He named his daughter Andromache and his son Agamemnon. He was obsessed with himself. He claimed to have known at the age of 8 that he was going to discover Troy. He told everyone he had read the Iliad and the Odyssey but that was later proved as false.

I think all of this scandal and controversy is very interesting and adds to the romanticism of archeology. We'll never know I guess because there's no way to know for certain. We can only make educated guesses about the past that we know so little about.