{"it":{"id":"NX-A49","name":"Mask of Agamemnon","kind":"artifact","sub":"Disputed","place":"Mycenae, Greece (find-spot); now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens","lat":37.73083,"lon":22.75611,"date":"16th c. BC (NAM; 1550-1500 BC typical)","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Mask of Agamemnon","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon"},{"t":"Wikidata Q1126741","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1126741"},{"t":"National Archaeological Museum Athens (Odysseus portal)","u":"http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=4503"},{"t":"National Archaeological Museum Athens (Odysseus portal, obj 4503)","u":"http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=4503"}],"tags":[],"nfacts":12,"coord_basis":"find-spot (coordinate of discovery-place entity): Mycenae","acc":"NAM 624","flag":"provenance problem","sum":"A gold mask with a curled moustache and a beard is the most famous object from Mycenae. Heinrich Schliemann found it on 30 November 1876, and three days later he closed the dig.\n\nThe mask comes from grave V in Grave Circle A. Greece's Odysseus museum guide lists it as one of five gold masks from the royal tombs, the only bearded one, dated to the 16th century BC and kept in hall 4 of the National Archaeological Museum, inventory 624. It is called the Mask of Agamemnon, though Schliemann himself never identified it as Agamemnon's.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is how different it looks. Its beard, moustache and cut-out ears set it apart from the other flat masks.\n\nIn 1999 William Calder of the University of Illinois gave nine reasons to suspect a hoax. He pointed to the timing, to Schliemann's record of made-up stories and to the Prussian-style moustache, and he asked for an independent metal test. David Traill wrote that he \"simply\" did not know whether the mask was genuine, altered or fake. Katie Demakopoulou, a former director of the National Archaeological Museum, replied that it has always been seen as genuine Mycenaean work. She called the doubts \"totally unsupported archaeologically\".\n\nWhy has the museum not tested it, and would a test settle the question?","nsrc":4,"new":1,"qs":["The Mask of Agamemnon predates Agamemnon by centuries. How much of ancient history did excavators shape to fit what they wanted?","Calder and Traill say Schliemann salted the site; a Greek official supervised it. Who do you believe?","If Homer's world left gold like this, what else in ancient stories might be real history?"],"why":"The Mask of Agamemnon is famous worldwide. Two historians asked whether Schliemann planted it.","yt":"Read the challenge.","rel":["EUR-009"],"hook":"Schliemann found this gold mask on 30 November 1876 and closed the dig three days later."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"NX-A49","qs":["Should the National Archaeological Museum allow a metal test of the mask?","Schliemann closed the dig three days after the find. Coincidence or a clue?","How much should a discoverer's honesty count when we judge his finds?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/Athens_%E2%80%94_Mask_of_Agamemnon.jpg/1280px-Athens_%E2%80%94_Mask_of_Agamemnon.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Athens_%E2%80%94_Mask_of_Agamemnon.jpg","title":"Athens — Mask of Agamemnon.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Gleb Simonov","cap":"Photo of Mask of Agamemnon","alt":"Photo of Mask of Agamemnon"}],"ms":[{"a":"Height","v":"25 cm (0.25 m, NAM)","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikipedia: Mask of Agamemnon","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon"},{"a":"Weight","v":"168.5 g","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikipedia: Mask of Agamemnon","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon"},{"a":"Inventory","v":"NAM 624","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikipedia: Mask of Agamemnon","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon"},{"a":"Found","v":"1876, Grave V, Grave Circle A, Mycenae","u":"","b":"V","g":"VERIFIED","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikipedia: Mask of Agamemnon","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon"},{"a":"material (Wikidata)","v":"gold","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikidata Q1126741","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1126741"},{"a":"height (Wikidata)","v":"0.025 metre","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikidata Q1126741","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1126741"},{"a":"width (Wikidata)","v":"0.017 metre","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikidata Q1126741","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1126741"},{"a":"mass (Wikidata)","v":"168.5 gram","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikidata Q1126741","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1126741"},{"a":"collection (Wikidata)","v":"National Archaeological Museum of Athens","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikidata Q1126741","url":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1126741"},{"a":"Height","v":"25 cm (0.25 m, NAM)","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"National Archaeological Museum Athens (Odysseus portal, obj 4503)","url":"http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=4503"},{"a":"Weight","v":"168.5 g","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"National Archaeological Museum Athens (Odysseus portal)","url":"http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=4503"},{"a":"Inventory","v":"NAM 624","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"National Archaeological Museum Athens (Odysseus portal)","url":"http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=4503"}],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Mask of Agamemnon","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon"},{"t":"Wikidata Q1126741","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1126741"},{"t":"National Archaeological Museum Athens (Odysseus portal)","u":"http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=4503"},{"t":"National Archaeological Museum Athens (Odysseus portal, obj 4503)","u":"http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=4503"},{"id":"VNX-A49-5","t":"Hellenic Ministry of Culture (Odysseus): National Archaeological Museum, Mycenaean collection (archived)","u":"https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=4503"},{"id":"VNX-A49-6","t":"Archaeology magazine (1999): Behind the Mask of Agamemnon","u":"https://archive.archaeology.org/9907/etc/mask.html"},{"id":"VNX-A49-7","t":"Archaeology magazine (1999): Calder, the mask debate","u":"https://archive.archaeology.org/9907/etc/calder.html"},{"id":"VNX-A49-8","t":"Archaeology magazine (1999): Traill on the mask","u":"https://archive.archaeology.org/9907/etc/traill.html"},{"id":"VNX-A49-9","t":"Archaeology magazine (1999): Demakopoulou on the mask","u":"https://archive.archaeology.org/9907/etc/dema.html"}],"sum":"On 30 November 1876, in a deep shaft grave inside the walls of Mycenae, in southern Greece, Heinrich Schliemann's workmen uncovered a body at the south end of the tomb with a gold mask over its face. It showed a man with a long thin nose, closed eyes, a full beard and a moustache curled up at the tips. Three days later Schliemann closed the excavation. He had come to Mycenae looking for the tomb of Agamemnon, the king who led the Greeks against Troy in Homer's Iliad, and to the world this face became Agamemnon's. Historian Cathy Gere has called it the \"Mona Lisa of prehistory.\" For decades, a small number of scholars have asked whether it is what it seems.\n\nSchliemann was a businessman turned archaeologist who had dug at Troy from 1871 to 1873 and claimed to have shown that Homer's poems had a basis in fact. The ancient geographer Pausanias had placed Agamemnon's grave at Mycenae, and Schliemann read him as meaning inside the citadel walls. Between August and December 1876 he excavated there under a permit held by the Greek Archaeological Society, which, after his conduct at Troy, sent the archaeologist Panagiotis Stamatakis to supervise him. His men found a circle of grave markers about 90 feet across just inside the gate, now called Grave Circle A, and inside it five deep shaft graves. They held the bodies of chieftains with weapons and great quantities of gold. Five of the dead wore gold masks, in Graves IV and V.\n\nThe mask from Grave V is now inventory 624 in hall 4 of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. It is about 25 centimetres high (one database lists 0.025 metres, an evident slip) and weighs 168.5 grams. It was made from a single thick sheet of gold, heated and hammered against a wooden form, with the details then chased in with a sharp tool. The museum dates it to the sixteenth century BC, some 300 to 400 years before the Trojan War of legend would have taken place; some put the contents of the graves earlier still. Schliemann himself never named it as Agamemnon's in writing. The famous line \"I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon\" is a telegram he is supposed to have sent, to King George I in one account and to a Greek newspaper in another. What he did announce to the king was the discovery of graves that tradition gave to Agamemnon and his companions.\n\nWhat sets the mask apart is how different it is from the others. David Traill compared it with the three other flat masks from the grave circles. On those, the eyebrows form a single arch with engraved hairs; on this one, two arches, the hairs cut out so they stand proud of the brow. Their ears are part of the mask; its ears are cut out like flaps. They have short mouths, thick lips and no chins; it has a wide mouth, thin lips and a clear chin. They have no facial hair; it has a beard from ear to ear, an upturned handlebar moustache, and an imperial, a pointed tuft below the lower lip. Neither the handlebar nor the imperial is known anywhere else in Mycenaean or Minoan art. Traill also noted that the upturned tips of the moustache look like later, carelessly done additions, and that of three early eyewitness accounts, the newspaper Argolis described \"an engraved beard four to five inches long, but no moustache.\" The earliest photograph, showing the moustache, dates from at least five weeks after the find.\n\nThe case against it rests partly on Schliemann's character. In 1999 William Calder of the University of Illinois, who had spent 25 years on Schliemann's life, gave Archaeology magazine nine reasons to suspect a hoax. Schliemann had invented stories about himself, from a White House reception to the discovery of a bust of Cleopatra that he had in fact bought. He had explored having copies of Priam's Treasure made in Paris to give the Ottomans. Contemporaries accused him of planting finds; one British group said, \"He who hideth can find.\" The excavation was closed on 26 and 27 November, and Calder asked where Schliemann had been, noting an allegation that a relative of his wife was an Athenian goldsmith. The handlebar moustache, Calder argued, was a nineteenth-century emblem of authority, and he pointed to how German artists of the period pictured Agamemnon, with a full beard and moustache. He asked for an independent metal test. Traill went further on method, noting that Schliemann's diary shows Grave V dug to within a metre of the burials by 20 November, that Stamatakis complained he could not watch some 100 workmen, and that Schliemann paid a bonus for every find. Still, Traill wrote, asked whether the mask is authentic, altered, from a later burial or a fake, \"I would have to say I simply do not know.\"\n\nThe defence is strong. Katie Demakopoulou, a former director of the National Archaeological Museum, replied that the mask has always been seen as genuine Mycenaean work, as specialists such as Emily Vermeule and Sinclair Hood judged it, and called the doubts \"totally unsupported archaeologically.\" Vermeule and Ellen Davis had shown that its beard is \"almost identical\" to the mane and locks of the gold lion-head rhyton, a ritual vessel, from Grave IV, and Vermeule attributed both to the same artist. The excavation, defenders note, was closed on 26 and 27 November for a Sunday holiday and rain, and reopened only once Stamatakis had arranged credible witnesses; three other masks came out on the 28th. Stamatakis's close supervision, Demakopoulou argued, is itself evidence against planted finds. Modern archaeological research suggests the mask is genuine.\n\nThere is one more fact, and it sits awkwardly with both sides. Traill had asked for a scientific examination of the mask. In 1983 Greece's Central Archaeological Council refused, following the museum's opinion that there was no reason to doubt it and so no need to test it. Traill described such a test as fairly straightforward.\n\nSo the most famous face of the Greek Bronze Age has never been tested, because its keepers see no reason to, and its critics can offer only suspicion. If a test is simple and the mask is genuine, why not settle it, and if it were done, would either side accept what it showed?"},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/NX-A49.webp","w":1280,"h":1211,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/Athens_%E2%80%94_Mask_of_Agamemnon.jpg/1280px-Athens_%E2%80%94_Mask_of_Agamemnon.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}