Burial customs and structures

Mycenaean burial practices belong to the Bronze Age Greek world that forms the background to Homer’s epics. Archaeological graves reveal how communities treated their dead: where they buried bodies, what they placed beside them and how much effort they invested in a lasting burial place. Practices varied between regions and over time, so there was no single funeral pattern followed by everyone.

Inhumation, the burial of a body, was a normal practice. In chamber tombs, bodies were usually laid on their backs on the chamber floor, without a fixed direction. Objects could be placed nearby as grave goods. These offerings honoured the deceased and may suggest continuing concern for them after death, although they cannot establish exactly what people believed about an afterlife.

Funerals could include processions, feasts and animal sacrifices. Painted clay burial chests, or larnakes, from Tanagra in Boeotia depict funerary processions and mourning singers. Such evidence helps reconstruct ceremonies, but a practice recorded in one place should not automatically be applied to every Mycenaean burial.

Burial also expressed differences in wealth and power. A simple grave required far fewer resources than a deep shaft grave or a monumental stone tomb. The contrast matters: impressive elite burials show that some people were honoured lavishly, not that everyone received the same treatment.

Cist graves: a simple lined burial space

A cist grave was a rectangular grave whose interior was lined with stone slabs or mudbrick. It was generally used for an individual burial. Its relatively small, straightforward structure contrasts with tombs designed to accommodate several bodies or repeated funerals.

Cist graves continued in use during the Mycenaean period. They were much simpler to construct than monumental tombs and could contain virtually no offerings. This suggests more modest resources and less elaborate material commemoration. It does not mean that relatives felt no affection or respect for the deceased: archaeology preserves expenditure more readily than emotion.

Shaft graves: depth, roofing and multiple burials

A shaft grave was a deep rectangular pit. At its bottom was a burial space, roofed with slabs supported on wooden beams. Earth filled the space above the roof, separating the buried bodies from the surface. An upright stele could mark the grave above ground.

Unlike the generally individual cist burial, a shaft grave could contain more than one body. The dead could be laid on their backs with their legs slightly bent. Traces of wood suggest that coffins may sometimes have been used. Rich clothing and grave goods in elite examples reveal the high status of the people buried there.

The shaft graves of Grave Circle A at Mycenae date to about 1550–1500 BC and were approximately 1–4 m deep. Their depth required substantial digging and may have helped protect the burials from disturbance. Their roof construction also created a sheltered burial space beneath the filled shaft, rather than leaving the bodies directly beneath all the earth.

Grave Circle A originally stood outside the citadel. Around 1250 BC, an extension of the fortifications brought it inside. Incorporating an older burial ground into the fortified settlement suggests that these prestigious dead retained importance for later inhabitants. The detailed contents of the grave circles provide a further way to investigate this status.

Chamber tombs: a room cut into the hillside

A chamber tomb was a subterranean room excavated from the hillside itself. Unlike a tholos, its chamber was not created by building a circular stone wall and dome. Chamber tombs were the most widespread Mycenaean grave type and were used for successive burials.

A long, narrow approach passage, called a dromos, led to the entrance. Chamber shapes varied: some were roughly four-sided, while others were oval or horseshoe-shaped. The character of the ground influenced what could be excavated, so variation in shape does not necessarily indicate a different function.

After a burial, the entrance was blocked with stones. Libations could be poured in front of it, followed by the breaking of the vessels used. The dromos was then filled with earth. These actions combined ceremony with physically closing the burial place.

For a later burial, the earth and blocking stones were removed. If space was needed, earlier bones could be moved aside or placed in pits or niches. Reuse therefore explains why excavators may find bones grouped away from their original burial positions. This need not mean that the tomb had been robbed or that the dead were treated carelessly: rearrangement could be part of its continuing use.

Tholos tombs: building a monumental burial chamber

A tholos tomb had a circular chamber built from stone and roofed by corbelling. Each horizontal course projected slightly further inwards than the one below. As the rings narrowed towards the top, they produced a high, enclosing roof with a beehive-like profile. This was not a true arch: its shape resulted from progressively overlapping stone courses.

A dromos approached the tomb through the hillside to a substantial entrance. A lintel spanned the doorway. In examples such as the Treasury of Atreus, a relieving triangle above the lintel reduced the weight bearing directly on it. The chamber lay beneath an earth-covered mound, making the burial place a substantial feature of the landscape.

The Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, dated to about 1300–1250 BC, provides a striking example. Its circular chamber is 14.60 m in diameter and 13.40 m high, approached by a dromos 36 m long and 6 m wide. A smaller rock-cut side chamber adjoins the main chamber. Despite its name, this building was a tomb, not evidence for an actual treasury belonging to the legendary Atreus.

Construction involved cutting into the hill and fitting carefully worked stone blocks. The scale, engineering and decorated entrance demonstrate access to considerable resources and skilled labour. The tomb remained in use over a long period; earth placed in the approach after burials shows that closure did not necessarily mean permanent abandonment.

What burial structures tell us—and what they cannot

The four types reveal different investments in the dead. Cist graves provided relatively simple individual burial spaces; shaft graves created deeper, roofed spaces for multiple burials; chamber tombs offered reusable rooms excavated into hillsides; and tholos tombs turned burial into monumental architecture.

Tombs near settlements, grave markers and the later incorporation of Grave Circle A into the citadel all suggest that the dead remained connected to the living community. Large tombs also demonstrate that honouring particular individuals or groups could command substantial labour and wealth.

However, tomb size is not a direct measure of personal grief, and elite monuments cannot represent the whole population. The strongest interpretation combines the structures, their use and their setting: the Mycenaeans invested in remembering and accommodating their dead, but the visible scale of that investment was unequal.