Mycenae

Mycenae is a Bronze Age citadel in the Argolis region of the northeastern Peloponnese, Greece, built on a hill 274 meters above sea level inland from the Saronic Gulf, and it was the dominant center of Mycenaean Greek civilization across southern Greece, Crete, the Cyclades and parts of Anatolia between roughly 1600 and 1100 BC. At its peak around 1350 BC the citadel and its lower town covered about 32 hectares and held a population near 30,000, defended by cyclopean walls of stone blocks weighing well over 20 tonnes and entered through the Lion Gate, its carved relieving triangle among the best known images of the Aegean Bronze Age. The German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated the site's Grave Circle A in the 1870s, uncovering gold funerary masks including the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, artifacts later shown to predate the Trojan War by centuries. UNESCO inscribed Mycenae as a World Heritage Site in 1999, together with the nearby citadel of Tiryns.