Buried Cities, Volume 3: Mycenae — Reading Notes

The Digger’s Eye View

Hall consistently emphasizes the act of digging itself. She describes the hilltop covered with “soft soil” and the broken ring of a great wall, then moves to the circle of royal tombs where Schliemann found the famous treasure. The text includes a photograph caption noting that the treasure was “given to Greece” and now resides in the Museum at Athens. Hall’s language is concrete: she mentions the “thirty feet above the earth” walls and the “twenty feet thick” sections. She does not speculate on the culture’s decline; instead, she lingers on what was physically uncovered—golden masks, bronze helmets, carved gems. The reader is positioned as a fellow explorer, peering over Schliemann’s shoulder.

Reading the Artifacts

Hall treats each object as a source of inference. Of the gold mask, she writes that the artist “tried to make the mask look just as the great king himself had looked, but this was very hard to do.” She notes the cow’s head with golden horns and connects it to a passage from Homer’s Iliad about sacrificing a heifer and gilding its horns. The warrior vase shows “short chitons with fringe” and “strangely shaped shields.” Hall does not claim to know the meaning of every detail; she points out what is visible and lets the reader wonder. The gems show “fighting or killing lions,” the cups show “catching the wild bulls in nets.” These observations build a picture of a people who were both warriors and artists.

The Limits of the Evidence

Hall is careful not to overstate what the ruins reveal. She writes that from the palace interior we know “much about the art of the Mycenaeans, something about their government, their trade, their religion, their home life, their amusements, and their ways of fighting, though they lived three thousand years ago.” The word “something” is telling. She then poses a question to the reader: “If a great modern city should be buried, and men should dig it up three thousand years later, what do you think they will say about us?” This humility about interpretation runs through the text. Hall does not pretend to have a complete story; she presents the fragments and invites the reader to join the detective work.

Hall’s Mycenae is best read as a guided tour of a museum in prose. The photographs and captions are integral to the argument; the text often describes what the images show. Readers should pay attention to the captions, which sometimes contain observations not repeated in the main narrative. The book is short—about 35 minutes of reading—but dense with specific artifacts. Treat each object as a clue, and note where Hall connects a find to Homer or to everyday life. The pleasure is in the detail, not in any grand theory.

That grey afternoon, with rain ticking against the glass, I sat with Jennie Hall’s account of the Mycenaean gold masks, feeling the ache of lives reduced to glittering artifacts. Later, restless, I drifted toward the older world that made those bronzes possible. A quiet shelf offered The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1: Chaldaea The History, Geography, And Antiquities Of Chaldaea, Assyria, Babylon, Media, Persia, Parthia — Inside the Classic, and the rainy light seemed to deepen, as if the two ruins were quietly speaking to one another.