The location of the central megaron unit within each of the three best preserved

Mycenaean palaces clearly indicates that it was the architectural focus of the
entire palatial structure. A visitor to the palace is inevitably led, indeed
steered, directly toward this megaron. From the fact that the megaron contained a
throne against the right-hand wall of its principal room (compare the position of the
throne in the earlier Throne Room at Knossos, but also note the presence of a second
throne in the Queens Megaron at Tiryns and in the so-called Throne Room at
Mycenae), as well as from the extraordinary decorative embellishment of
the megaron complex, this unit seems likely to have been the place where the
administrative authority resident in the palace held court. In this sense, Mycenaean
palatial architecture may be characterized as centripetal, in contrast to
the centrifugal nature of Minoan palatial architecture. Note that
the megaron block in a Mycenaean palace is isolated and not an integral part
of a more complex unit, as all large or elaborately decorated spaces within a
Minoan palace appear to be.
Mycenaean palaces reflect much more individuality in their design than do
Minoan palaces in the sense that there are far fewer recurrent features in the
former than in the latter. Individual features within specific Mycenaean palaces
appear to have been adopted almost haphazardly (at the whim of a particular ruler?) from
Crete: the banquet hall at Pylos; the Grand Staircase at Mycenae; the wall with
multiple apertures connecting porch and vestibule in the Tirynthian megaron, loosely
comparable to a Minoanpier-and-door partition; the lavish use of colonnades at Tiryns.
The Mycenaean heritage from Crete in terms of palatial architecture appears
to have consisted primarily of the concept of the palace itself as an
administrative center. The heart of a Mycenaean palace, the main throne room with
its large central hearth, is simply a monumental version of the normal private house of
the EH III and MH periods and has no connection with Minoan architectural forms.
Individual Minoan architectural features are, to be sure, taken over by the Mycenaeans,
but these are selectively rather than universally adopted, except perhaps in the case of the
extensive uses of frescoes, cut stone masonry, and downward tapering columns. These
last, however, are architectural attributes of arguably lesser overall significance than the
designs of architectural spaces.
As in the cases of funerary architectural forms, most notably the tholos, the
Mycenaeans have adopted something Minoan but have altered, even
perverted, it to suit their own societal needs. With regard to both their tholoi and
their palaces, it is the Mycenaean ruling class rather than the Mycenaean population at
large which has absorbed Minoan forms into Mainland Greek building practices. With the
downfall of this ruling class as a dominant political force ca. 1200 B.C., the Minoan forms
represented by Mycenaean palatial architecture, the Linear B writing system, and even
tholoi in areas other than Messenia and Thessaly disappear from Mainland Greece.
Whereas the Minoan palace qualifies as an artifactual type because it
consists of a combination of constantly recurring units, the Mycenaean
palace is not immediately recognizable as a type because the units of which it
consists are so variable. Indeed, it is perhaps legitimate to view the Mycenaean palace
simply as a highly elaborate Middle Helladic megaron with the nature and degree of the
elaboration left up to the individual dynast. In this connection, it is worth emphasizing
again that Minoan features adopted in Mycenaean palaces consist of relatively simple
forms and never of a complex of two or more major architectural spaces. The emphasis
on circulation of light and air in Minoan architecture is altogether
disregarded by the closed and somewhat stuffy nature of Mycenaean palatial
design. Imagine what the interior of a Mycenaean throne room must have been like with

a fire always burning on the large central hearth! There is nothing in Mycenaean
domestic architecture comparable to the villas and mansions of Neopalatial Crete. Lower
towns existed below the hilltops at Mycenae, Pylos, and Tiryns, but little of these has as
yet been cleared and it is therefore still impossible to compare a Mycenaean town with
such Minoan equivalents as Gournia or Palaikastro, notwithstanding the attempt by the
Minnesota Messenia Expedition in the late 1960s and early 1970s to expose the plan of
an entire Mycenaean settlement at Nichoria. The hilltop of a Mycenaean palatial
center was always reserved for the residence of the monarch and its
associated outbuildings, and frequently this distinction between royal
domain and that of the common people was emphasized by the construction
of massive fortification walls around the former. Such a distinction is of course
lacking on Crete, not only because Minoan palaces were not always placed on hilltops
(Mallia, Zakro) but also because Minoan Neopalatial fortifications as such are to all
intents and purposes non-existent.
It is important to make the distinction between palace (a term identifying
the residential architecture reserved for royalty) and citadel (a term which
marks the site so identified as fortified but not necessarily the seat of a royal
residence). Pylos in the LH IIIB period is a palace but not a citadel; Mycenae, Tiryns,
and Athens are both palaces and citadels; Gla is a citadel but arguably not a palace;
Thebes is a palace but perhaps not a citadel.
Along the lines of the palatial relative chronology commonly used for the Minoan Bronze
Age of Crete, one could outline the following Mycenaean palatial chronology for the
Greek Mainland during the Late Bronze Age only:
LH I-IIA Early Mycenaean (or ca. 1680-1500 B.C.
Pre-Palatial)
LH IIB-IIIA1 Protopalatial ca. 1500-1400 B.C.
LH IIIA2-IIIB Neopalatial ca. 1400-1200 B.C.
LH IIIC Post-Palatial ca. 1200-1050 B.C.
It is tempting to associate the beginning of the above Protopalatial period with the LM IB
destruction horizon which marks the end of the Neopalatial period on Crete. Likewise,
the dividing line between the above Protopalatial and Neopalatial periods is perhaps to be
connected with the destruction of the palace at Knossos early in the LM/LH IIIA2 period,
ca. 1385/1375 B.C. Thus far, the only building identifiable as a Protopalatial Mycenaean
palace is the Menelaion of Periods 1 and 2 in Laconia, although the excavator of Tiryns
has claimed that the earliest palace there under the LH IIIB megaron dates from the LH
IIIA1 period.

R. L. N. Barber, The Origins of the Mycenaean Palace, in J. M. Sanders

(ed.), PHILOLAKON: Lakonian Studies in Honour of Hector Catling (London 1992) 1123

E. B. French, Town Planning in Palatial Mycenae, in S. Owen and L. Preston

(eds.), Inside the City in the Greek World: Studies in Urbanism from the Bronze Age to
the Hellenistic Period (Oxford 2009) 55-61.

E. French and K. Shelton, Early Palatial Mycenae, in A. Dakouri-Hild and S. Sherratt

(eds.),AUTOCHTHON: Papers Presented to O. T. P. K. Dickinson on the Occasion of His
Retirement [BAR-IS1432] (Oxford 2005) 175-184

C. Hopkins, The Megaron of the Mycenaean Palace, SMEA 6(1968) 45-53