Bronze Age Greek Architecture
Knossos
Around 1700 BC, a great earthquake shook the island of Crete and knocked down the palaces (or big houses) that many people had been living in. The people rebuilt these palaces much bigger and more beautiful than before, but still along the same lines of all the rooms being stuck together (agglutinative). This was not long after the first great palaces of Western Asia and Egypt, and maybe the Cretans got the idea from there.
A Tholos tomb at Mycenae
Around 1400 BC on the mainland, the Greeks were building big stone tombs for their kings and queens. These are called tholos (THOUGH-lows) tombs. They start out big at the bottom and gradually get narrower as they go up:
Lion Gate at Mycenae
The Greeks on the mainland also built palaces for themselves, around 1400 BC. These combined the decorations of the Cretan palaces with the old megaron form to make the typical Mycenean palace, which we have found not only at Mycenae but also at many other Late Bronze Age sites around Greece like Tiryns (TEER-ins) and Pylos (PIE-lows).
To find out more about Late Bronze Age Greek architecture, check out these books on Amazon.com or from your library:
Greece in the Bronze Age, by Emily Vermeule (1972). Now rather out of date, but there's no newer book that pulls it all together.
Minoan and Mycenaean Art, by Reynold Higgins (2nd revised edition 1997) The standard book for college students.
Aegean Art and Architecture (Oxford History of Art), by Donald Preziosi, Louise A. Hitchcock (2000)
Knossos, A Complete Guide to the Palace of Minos, by Anna Michailidou (1995)
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This page was reviewed for accuracy by Ioannis Georganas in March 2005.
