Lion Gate at Mycenae

The Lion Gate served as the main entrance to the citadel of Mycenae. It seems to have been constructed during the mid-13th century by masons and sculptors who were familiar with both Mycenaean and Minoan styles, and who appear also to have had some knowledge of Hittite stonework. The gate is constructed in the Cyclopean masonry style of the city walls, with a monolithic stone lintel topped with a relieving triangle, into which was set a thinner slab of stone with relief decoration. The relief depicts two lions (or, as some scholars have argued, griffins, as the loss of the figures' heads renders their identification ambiguous) posed heraldically on either side of a Minoan-style pillar. The Gate was excavated by Kyriakos Pittakis and the Archaeological Society at Athens in 1841, and had already become an iconic ruin before Heinrich Schliemann identified and popularized Mycenaean culture.