GRE0181 – The Prince of Mycene

The Prince of Mycenae: A Warrior of the Shaft Graves

Before classical Greece, before the polis and the hoplite, there was a palace civilisation on the Argive plain that buried its rulers with gold. The Mycenaean warrior of the sixteenth to twelfth centuries BC belonged to a world of citadels, chariots and warrior aristocracies — the world that Homer half-remembered eight centuries later.

The Citadel and the Gold

Mycenae sits on a rocky spur commanding the road between the Argolid and the Corinthian gulf. Its walls of unworked blocks were so massive that later Greeks assumed the Cyclopes had built them. Inside Grave Circle A, Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 uncovered shaft burials filled with gold death-masks, inlaid daggers, boars’-tusk helmets and rapiers — the grave goods of a military elite that had accumulated extraordinary wealth. The mask he called Agamemnon predates any plausible Trojan War by three centuries, but the burials tell us exactly what a Mycenaean prince was: a man defined by his weapons.

Arms of a Bronze Age Aristocrat

The panoply recovered at Dendra gives the fullest picture: a full suit of overlapping bronze plates enclosing the torso, shoulders and neck, with a boars’-tusk helmet — a cap built from dozens of split tusks sewn onto a leather base, exactly as Homer describes in the Iliad. The weapons were the long thrusting rapier, the slashing sword that replaced it, the figure-of-eight or tower shield in oxhide, and the chariot, used to bring the fighter to the field rather than to fight from.

A Literate Kingdom

The palaces kept records in Linear B, a syllabic script deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952 and shown to be an early form of Greek. The tablets are inventories, not literature: rations, textiles, bronze allocations, chariot wheels, lists of rowers. They reveal a centralised redistributive economy with a ruler titled wanax — and they survive only because the fires that destroyed the palaces baked the clay.

The Collapse

Around 1200 BC the Mycenaean world came apart. Pylos, Tiryns, Thebes and Mycenae itself were burned within a few decades, the palace system vanished, Linear B was forgotten, and Greece entered centuries without writing or monumental building. The causes are still argued — the Sea Peoples, drought, internal revolt, systems collapse — but the outcome is not in doubt.

Giuseppe Rava’s Original Work

Giuseppe Rava reconstructs the Mycenaean prince from the excavated material rather than from later convention: the boars’-tusk helmet, the plated bronze armour of the Dendra type, the ox-hide shield and the long rapier. The result shows a warrior aristocrat of the Aegean Bronze Age as the archaeology actually presents him.

This is a limited edition fine art print, hand-signed by the artist, produced in SRA3 format on fine art paper. Ships worldwide.