Minoan and Mycenaean Art and Architecture

Vocabulary flashcards covering the key concepts, historical figures, archaeological sites, architecture, and paintings of Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations.

Uluburun Shipwreck

A Late Bronze Age shipwreck off the coast of Turkey containing raw materials and luxury goods (including tin, copper, ivory, glass, and a scarab seal of Nefertiti) that demonstrates widespread Mediterranean trade connectivity.

Linear B

An Aegean Bronze Age syllabic script used primarily for palace accounting, inventories, and administrative records, rather than literary texts.

Homer

An $8^{\text{th}}\text{-century BCE}$ Iron Age Greek poet whose epic poems looked back to a heroic Bronze Age and provided the primary motivation for early Aegean archaeology.

Hissarlik

An archaeological mound (höyük) in northwestern Turkey excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s; level Hissarlik 7 is widely identified as the $13^{\text{th}}\text{-century BCE}$ Bronze Age city of Troy.

Style

A set of distinctive features—including subject matter, materials, techniques, and forms—that allows art historians to classify and group similar visual objects together.

Knossos

The largest known Minoan palace site on Crete, excavated by Minos Kalokairinos in the $19^{\text{th}}$ century and extensively excavated and restored by Arthur Evans between 1900 and 1931.

Labyrinth

A term translated as the "house of the double axe," associated mythologically with the Minotaur and architecturally with the complex, multi-tiered layout of the palace at Knossos.

Minoan Column

A distinctive wooden architectural column that tapers downward toward the base, typically painted red and black with a rounded, pillow-shaped capital that does not mimic natural plant forms.

Bull-Leaping Fresco

A Minoan wall painting from Knossos showing elite acrobats grasping the horns and vaulting over a charging bull, illustrating elite Minoan interaction with nature.

Akrotiri

A Bronze Age settlement on the island of Thera (Santorini) preserved and sealed beneath volcanic tephra, revealing multistory domestic architecture and intact frescoes.

Spring Fresco

An in situ wall painting discovered at Akrotiri depicting red lilies and swallows flying across a brightly colored, undulating rocky landscape, thought to represent a supernatural landscape transformed by divinity.

Crocus Gatherers

A fresco from Akrotiri depicting young women collecting saffron crocuses into buckets for valuable golden dye, blending close naturalistic observation with ritual activity.

Megaron

The central, axial reception hall and administrative core of a Mycenaean palace, characterized by an open porch, an anteroom, and a large rectangular room with a central round hearth surrounded by four columns.

Grave Circle A

An elite circular cemetery within the citadel walls at Mycenae dating to ca. 1300 BCE, containing deep shaft graves and rich funerary gold discovered by Heinrich Schliemann.

Mask of Agamemnon

A repoussé gold funerary death mask excavated by Heinrich Schliemann from Grave Circle A at Mycenae, named by the excavator after the legendary leader of Homer's Achaeans.

Tholos Tomb

A circular, subterranean Mycenaean beehive-shaped tomb entered through a long stone-walled dromos and constructed with concentric courses of corbeled ashlar masonry.

Relieving Triangle

A triangular open space formed by corbeling masonry above a massive lintel in Mycenaean architecture, designed to divert the downward structural load onto the supporting door jambs.

Treasury of Atreus

A monumental tholos tomb constructed at Mycenae 200–300 years after Grave Circle A, featuring a massive lintel stone, a relieving triangle, engaged columns, and a corbeled stone dome.

Lion Gate

The principal monumental gateway of the citadel of Mycenae (ca. 1300 BCE), composed of post-and-lintel construction crowned by a $9\text{-foot-tall}$ relief panel of two lions flanking a Minoan column.

N. Blackwell Reconstruction

A 2014 technical and stylistic analysis of the Lion Gate relief establishing that the attached feline heads were angled outward toward the approach road to actively guard the gate and watch for enemies.