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The Town That Got Away With Murder and Other Largely Forgotten Historic Events

Khalid Elhassan November 23, 2019 33 min

6. The Mask of Agamemnon

In 1876, Heinrich Schliemann went digging in the royal cemetery near the Lion Gate, the entrance to the citadel of Mycenae in southern Greece. In one of the graves, he found a funeral mask covered in gold, which he attributed to the legendary king from the Iliad. As Schliemann put it in a telegraph announcing the discovery: “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon“. However, as with his finds in Troy, Schliemann got the broad outlines right, but jumped the gun when it came to the details.

As later dating demonstrated, the mask did, indeed, belong to a Mycenaean king, but to one who had died circa 1580 to 1550 BC – two and a half to three centuries before the events of the Trojan War. The name stuck, however, and the artifact is still commonly referred to as the Mask of Agamemnon.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.