Bronze Age Aegean

Europe’s first civilization did not announce itself with statues of conquering kings or monuments to dynastic power.

High on a hill rising 274 meters above the Argive plain, the ruins of Mycenae command the strategic routes leading to the Isthmus of Corinth.

Centuries before the philosophers of Athens debated in the agora, a warrior elite ruled the Greek mainland from monumental palace-states like Pylos, Tiryns, and Mycenae itself.

Long before he stood upon the dusty mounds of the Aegean, Heinrich Schliemann was a boy listening to his impoverished pastor father recite the grand, sweeping battles of the Iliad.