helens_daughter | The Lion Gate

Mycenae's famous Lion Gate may be the oldest coat of arms in Europe. It utilizes a common feature of Mycenaean architecture, the relieving triangle, which was the Aegean Bronze Age's equivalent of the Roman keystone arch, bearing the load of the surrounding masonry.

The Lion Gate dates to roughly 1300-1250 B.C., to Mycenae's greatest period of renovation and expansion. Supporting terraces enabled the builders to extend the circuit walls, and bring Grave Circle A within the citadel, while providing more area for workshops, housing, and storerooms. The Lion Gate was part of a defensive system which included high Cyclopean walls and a bastion, from which defenders would have rained missiles down on attackers.

The lions on the gate might have been lionesses. They stand upon an altar, with a pillar between them; the pillar was a sacred symbol in Bronze Age Aegean iconography. Does the altar/pillar represent Mycenae itself? Are the lions/lionesses goddess symbols, like the griffins one sees the frescoes from the cult sanctuary? Part of the imagery is missing. We don't have the heads. These would have faced outward, due to spatial constraints, and would have been carved from steatite or some other stone, and bolted on.

In the early nineteenth century, the infamous Lord Elgin passed through Mycenae. He took the last remaining marbles and bits of carved alabaster from the Treasury of Atreus, and would have taken the Lion Gate, too, had he been able to move the twenty-ton edifice.