Helen's Daughter

This lovely bowl was carved in the shape of a duck from a single piece of rock crystal, and dates from between 1600-1550 B.C.  The rock crystal is Egyptian, but the carving appears to be Mycenaean.  At this time, Mycenaean artists began imitating the exquisite stone vases and vessels which came to them not only through their Minoan and Cycladic contacts, but also from farther-flung regions: Egypt, Syria, and Canaan.

Unlike other arts, such as weaving and fresco painting, which began as imitation but soon took on its own, unique Mycenaean character, Mycenaean stone carving remained true to its foreign prototypes.

The crystal duck bowl was discovered in Grave O in Mycenae’s Grave Circle B.

Among the remains found in Mycenae's Grave Circle B was Gamma 51, a young man of twenty-eight who stood 5 feet 8 inches tall.  Like the other individuals, he was robust, and in life would have been long and lean.

His was a rather poor burial, for while his neighbor and contemporary Gamma 55 was given gold and a sword, Gamma 51 was buried only with a few vases, and laid out at the foot of the grave, where he just managed to fit.

What is striking about Gamma 51 is the evidence of trepination on his skull.  Trepination is a surgical practice which goes back to Neolithic times, and involves cutting a hole in the skull.  Gamma 51 underwent the procedure, perhaps to relieve pressure caused by the blow he received to the right frontal bone.  Apparently, he did not survive long after the operation, because there is no evidence of healing around the hole.

In 1951, workers renovating the so-called Tomb of Clytemnestra at Mycenae discovered a cemetery that is now known as Grave Circle B.  The burials were excavated between 1952-1954. 

Thirty-six years later, in 1987, British forensic reconstruction specialists John Prag and Richard Naeve were asked to give faces to some of the human remains.  Initially, they were asked to put faces to the skulls found by Heinrich Schliemann in Grave Circle A, hopefully to provide a glimpse of the men behind the 'Mask of Agamemnon' and the other death masks.  Unfortunately, due to the high alkaline content in the soil around Mycenae, and the haphazard archaeological techniques of Schliemann's day, not enough material remained to attempt a reconstruction.

The remains in Grave Circle B had fared slightly better, partly due to more advanced and careful archaeological practices.  Prag and Naeve reconstructed several faces, all male, with the exception of one woman whose skull was intact enough for the procedure.  Technically, she is known as Gamma 58, but the forensic team dubbed her 'Clytemnestra,' after the most famous woman of the Atreid ruling dynasty, even though she would have lived 300 years before a real-life Clytemnestra.  Her pathology indicated she was around 35 at the time of death, tall and strongly built, though slender.   She showed arthritis in the lower back as well as in her hands.  It isn't clear how she died, or whether she had any children.  

During the reconstruction, the forensic team noticed similarities between her heart-shaped features and those of her fellow grave occupant, a young man known as Gamma 55; they speculated there might be a blood relationship between the two.  Later DNA analysis confirmed that Gamma 55 and 58 were, indeed, brother and sister.  So she's really more of an 'Elektra' than a 'Clytemnestra.'