The Treasury of Atreus or Tomb of Agamemnon is a large tholos or beehive tomb constructed between 1300 and 1250 BCE in Mycenae, Greece.
It is the largest and most elaborate tholos tomb known to have been constructed in the Aegean Bronze Age, and one of the last to have been built in the Argolid. The main tomb consisted of a circular burial chamber, or thalamos, topped with a corbelled dome. This dome was the largest in the world until the Roman period, and remains the world's largest corbelled dome. Originally, the façade was decorated with marble columns and sculptures, which used marble from the Mani Peninsula in the southern Peloponnese. Its artwork has been suggested to have been inspired by that of Minoan Crete and of Ancient Egypt.
Little is known of the persons who might have been buried in the tomb: the identification with the mythical Atreus and Agamemnon likely dates to the 18th century. The immense labour involved in the construction of the tomb, as well as the similarities between the architecture of the tholos and the structures of the citadel of Mycenae, has led to suggestions that it may have been intended for a ruler of Mycenae, and represent Mycenae's increasingly dominant status in the later part of the Bronze Age.
The tomb was first excavated in the 19thcentury, when parts of the marble sculptures of its façade were removed by the British aristocrat Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and the Ottoman governor Veli Pasha. It was partly excavated by Heinrich Schliemann, and more fully by Panagiotis Stamatakis, in the 1870s. Throughout the 20th century, the British School at Athens made a series of excavations in and around the tomb, led by Alan Wace, which primarily aimed to settle the difficult question of the date of its construction.
Name
Mythology
In Greek mythology, Atreus was the son of Hippodamia and Pelops, the king of Pisa in the western Peloponnese. In the version of the myth recounted by Hyginus, Atreus and his brother Thyestes killed their half-brother Chrysippus by casting him into a well out of jealousy, urged on by their mother. As a punishment for their crime, they were banished to Mycenae, where Hippodamia is variously said to have died by suicide or further exiled herself to Midea.
Atreus and Thyestes quarrelled for the throne of Mycenae: first, Thyestes gained it after Atreus' wife, Aerope, gave a golden lamb from Atreus' flock to Thyestes and then tricked him into agreeing that whoever held the lamb should become king. Atreus in turn managed to regain the throne after Hermes persuaded Thyestes to hand the kingship to Atreus if the sun were to rise in the west and set in the east, and then Helios altered the usual course of the sun so that it did exactly that. Finally, Atreus banished Thyestes after tricking him into eating the flesh of his own sons.
On the advice of an oracle, Thyestes had a son by his daughter, Pelopia, as it was foretold that this son would kill Atreus. When the infant, Aegisthus, was born, his mother abandoned him, but he was found by a shepherd and given to Atreus to raise; when Aegisthus entered adulthood, Thyestes revealed the truth of his parentage. Aegisthus killed Atreus and ruled Mycenae jointly with Thyestes.
The heroes Agamemnon and Menelaus were the twin sons of Atreus, sometimes known as the Atreides in Greek literature. After their father's murder, they took refuge with Tyndareus, king of Sparta: later, with Menelaus' assistance, Agamemnon overthrew Aegisthus and Thyestes and became king of Mycenae. However, Aegisthus would, along with Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra, kill Agamemnon on his return from the Trojan War, before being himself killed by Agamemnon's son, Orestes.
Modern name
The precise origin of the name is uncertain, but it probably dates to the 18th century. The tomb was visible in Antiquity, but not associated with Atreus or Agamemnon when Pausanias visited in the 2nd century CE, since he describes the graves of both rulers as being within the walls of Mycenae. After Pausanias, there are no documented accounts of travellers visiting Mycenae until 1700, when the Venetian engineer and surveyor Francesco Vandeyk identified both the Lion Gate and the tomb now known as the 'Treasury of Atreus', which he conjectured was the tomb of a king. Claude-Louis Fourmont, who visited Mycenae in 1729–1730, used the name 'Tomb of Atreus' for the monument: by the time Edward Daniel Clarke visited at the beginning of the 19th century, he could report a tradition that the tomb was known as 'Treasury of Atreus' and identified with the tomb of Agamemnon mentioned in Pausanias.