19. The Mask of Agamemnon
Few archaeologists have ever been as lucky as Heinrich Schliemann. After his accomplishment of excavating and proving the existence of ancient Troy, he captured lightning in a bottle once more, this time in mainland Greece, where he found what came to be known as the Mask of Agamemnon – the king who led the Greeks against Troy. It came about in 1876, when Schliemann went digging in the royal cemetery near the Lion Gate, the entrance to the citadel of Mycenae in southern Greece. In one of the graves, he found a funeral mask covered in gold, which he attributed to the legendary king from the Iliad.
As Schliemann put it in a telegraph announcing the discovery: “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon“. However, as with his finds in Troy, Schliemann got the broad outlines right, but jumped the gun when it came to the details. As later dating would demonstrate, the mask did, indeed, belong to a Mycenaean king, but to one who had died circa 1580 to 1550 BC – two and a half to three centuries before the events of the Trojan War. The name stuck, however, and the artifact is still commonly referred to as the Mask of Agamemnon.