CLYTEMNESTRA'S TOMB
Unesco site of Mycenae. Superb circular, vaulted underground tomb named after the legendary Queen Clytemnestra.
This monumental tomb (Τάφος Κλυταιμνήστρας/Tafos Klytaimnistras) was built around 1250 BCC. It is also very well preserved, and bears many similarities to the "Treasure of Atreus": the dromos (corridor) dug into an artificial tumulus leads to a vaulted hall in the shape of a "honeycomb", 13.4 m in diameter and 13.4 m high. The entrance is designed in the same way as the "Treasure of Atreus" and the Lioness Gate on the acropolis: with a relief triangle to lighten the weight above the lintel. The monument was looted several times. But during excavations in the 1960s, the body of a woman from the Mycenaean period was discovered inside. Archaeologists named her after Clytemnestra, the mythological queen of Mycenae and wife of Agamemnon. According to the legend of the Atrides, they married after Agamemnon had murdered his previous wife and their child. But he himself was killed by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus on his return from the Trojan War. The nearby circular tomb, 13 m in diameter (c. 1250 BC), which has lost its vault, is also known as the "Aegisthe tomb". The tragedy of the Atrides lineage ends with the murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus by Agamenon's children, Orestes and Electra. A bloody saga that inspired many authors of antiquity, but also contemporary ones, notably Jean-Paul Sartre (Les Mouches), who stayed in Mycenae with Simone de Beauvoir in 1937.
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