Report on the Excavations at the Northern Tip of the Lower Citadel of Tiryns 2000–2003

Abstract

New excavations have led to the unexpected result of a fundamental restructuring of the settlement plan of the northernmost part of the Lower Citadel during the last decades of the Mycenaean palatial period. The North Gate and the buildings on its inner side belong to a late phase of rebuilding in LH IIIB Final, while originally, at the time of the construction of the Cyclopean wall, the newly discovered North Passage was intended to be the only direct connection between the northern Lower Citadel and the Lower Town. The architectural analysis disentangles several stages in the construction of the vault of the North Passage and highlights the difference between this vaulted structure and drainage channels found in other parts of the Cyclopean fortification of the Lower Citadel. In addition, it is demonstrated that the North Passage served as a Sally Port which finds its closest parallel in the so-called North Gallery of the North-eastern Extension of Mycenae. The change of planning is interpreted as part of a far-reaching master plan, to which also the dam at Kophini and the re-direction of the stream are believed to belong. The ambitious, even visionary, character of the new plan suggests that shortly before the end of the palatial period the ruling elite regarded the political circumstances as stable. Moreover, the high amount of objects with links to Cyprus or the Levant in the debris of the destruction at the end of LH IIIB Final, among them the fragment of a bone or ivory rod with cuneiform signs and fragments of a faience rhyton probably in the shape of a monkey’s head, counters the assumption of a crisis in the long-distance trade on the eve of the catastrophe. A group of burials without grave furnishings is regarded as part of a burial place of the early post-palatial period (LH IIIC) in the northern Lower Citadel, which in some way was connected to the catastrophe. Either we are dealing here with burials of victims of this catastrophe, or the event had such shattering repercussions on the established rules on the use of space as well as on people’s religious convictions that temporarily the deceased were buried in a way not conforming to earlier traditions. The belated rebuilding of the northern Lower Citadel during LH IIIC is attributed to an awareness of the existence of this burial place.