View from the Palace of Nestor, toward Navarino Bay and the Ionian Sea.
On Tuesday April 4th of 1939, while ‘a dark and threatening weather’ was coming, Carl Blegen with his Greek and American colleagues broke ground on a hill in western Messenia, in Greece. Within eight hours they had brought to light ‘some stone walls of a large building […] earth black and red, all burned […] pottery sheds and a deposit of inscribed tablets […] lined out on flat side and inscribed, […] all complete […].
This is part of the very laconic way that Carl Blegen, the American archaeologist from the University of Cincinnati and a giant of prehistoric Greece, described in his notebook the first day of excavations at the so called ‘Palace of Nestor’ at Ano Englianos in Pylos, western Messenia, in the Peloponnese. Blegen and his team, who had already researched the area in the previous years, and had carefully planned their excavations, continued digging through the following months. By the end of the first season, they had recovered hundreds of inscribed tablets, and were certain that the ‘building with column bases and remains of frescoes’ which they had discovered was comparable to those already known from the Late Bronze Age sites at Mycenae, Tiryns and Thebes.
This was unquestionably the most dazzling ‘dark and stormy’ day of Greek Archaeology; a day that no one expected that would forever change the entire course of Aegean Prehistory. The discoveries of 1939 were the most important for Mycenaean archaeology since Schliemann’s golden treasures excavated in Mycenae almost half a century earlier.
By the late 1960s, the ‘Palace of Nestor’ in Pylos had been fully revealed and the results were spectacular: a complete floor plan of a large palatial complex, a vast corpus of documents inscribed in clay tablets, and a great number of burials. An extraordinary new source of evidence with which to understand Bronze Age Pylos and Greece.
View of Pylos the bay of Navarino and Sfaktiria (Wikimedia/commons)
Modern day Pylos, in the southwestern Peloponnese, is a charming coastal town in the south of the Bay of Navarino. It’s a well sheltered location behind the island of Sphacteria that provides safe havens for small vessels, as it did for the large European and Ottoman fleets of the 19th century. The ‘Palace of Nestor’, just a few miles away from the coast, and about 10 miles from modern Pylos, lies on the slopes of Mount Aigaleon and offers great views across a region of incredible natural beauty. Imagine a large coastal plain coated by the glittering silver leaves of centuries old olive trees; a well-watered river valley with arable lands dropping rapidly to the sparkling waters of the Ionian Sea, framed by spectacular mountains chains.
The oldest description of this beautiful land belongs to Homer and his well-known stories from both the Iliad and the Odyssey. According to his epic tales, Neleus, son of Poseidon and father of Nestor, was the first who settled in the region when he was forced to leave his homeland in central Greece due to family disputes with his brother. Neleus founded his Kingdom in Pylos and established his dynasty. His son, Nestor, whose youthful adventures are so vividly illustrated, succeeded to the throne and ‘reigned wisely’ for about three generations. During his reign, the kingdom reached its acme, became strong and wealthy, and participated in the Trojan War with 90 ships, the second largest fleet of the Greeks after that of King Agamemnon of Mycenae.
When the war ended, Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, left his island to sail to Pylos to discover the whereabouts of his father. On landing at ‘Sandy Pylos’, Telemachus found King Nestor who offered him hospitality. Τo honour Poseidon, they sacrificed bulls on the beach, then they marched all together to the very heart of the royal palace. Telemachus was warmly welcomed. He was fed sacrificial meat skewered on spits and roasted on an open fire. He overnighted in the nearby chambers, and the next morning he departed after he had been bathed and rubbed down with olive oil by the king’s youngest daughter; a very special treat!
Mycenaean tomb with tholos and tumulus of Voidokilia. (Wikimedia/commons)
There is, indeed, something very strong and convincing in these narratives, especially when a substantial number of prehistoric ruins and grave monuments have been found scattered all around the Bay of Navarino. And, although, such stories draw the attention, it is now common knowledge among scholars that the Homeric texts reflect the way that the Greeks of the 8th century BCE viewed their ancestors and heroic past, rather than the historical realities of the 2d millennium BCE.
Entrance path to the Palace of Nestor archaeological site.
The ‘Palace of Nestor’ at Ano Englianos lies on top of a low hill, 490ft ASL, and rises on all sides to a steep height, creating a kind of large plateau accessible via a long and steep ramp – levelled only in the 20th century by the archaeologists who created a new modern access. From the top of the acropolis, at the edge of the ridge, the views are incredible and cover the entire Navarino area.
Here, the first signs of activity belong to the early 2nd millennium BCE, when a small settlement, of which little is known, started to expand gradually around the hill. Around 1500 BCE it covered an area of about 17 acres, it was protected by a mighty fortification wall and surrounded by a great number of funerary monuments; the earliest yet known Mycenaean beehive or tholos tombs.
View of Tholos IV tomb at Pylos.
Around 1400 BCE, the settlement doubled in size reaching 32 acres, while on top of the acropolis the first substantial structures made their appearance. These earliest monumental buildings were the functional predecessors to the final palatial centre that we see today. They fulfilled the role of a centralised administration and shaped ‘The Palace of Nestor’ into a Mycenaean stronghold, that is to say, an economic, administrative and religious centre and seat of power, comparable to most of the contemporary major sites that we know from Late Bronze Age Greece, such as Mycenae, Tiryns, Athens, Thebes and many more.
These well-preserved stairs would have led to the royal living quarters or upper storage areas.
About a century later, ca. 1300 BCE, this first palatial complex was destroyed by a great fire. Soon thereafter, a major remodelling took place including .
the construction of a two-storey, multi-building complex of more than one hundred rooms – a hundred and five to be more precise! A new ‘megaron’, a central unit with gateways, vestibule and a new throne room at its very centre with powerful frescoes on the walls, replaced the previous one. New chambers, doorways, roofed porticoes with colonnades, new adjacent rooms with bathtubs, decorated fluted columns and multi-coloured painted floors, created a brand-new imposing space where courts and access points gave a different and more restricted type of circulation within it. It is nowadays clear to us that this new axial arrangement of the ‘megaron unit’ created a space in which all visitors would feel awe while being drawn to the seat of the authority of the region.
The throne room showing the circular clay hearth and the surrounding floor plan of the megaron.
Moreover, the number of workshops of high-quality products, mainly vases and oil containers, increased sharply and they were now placed in close proximity to the ‘megaron’ compartments. The number of storage units expanded as well, as did the archive and bureaucracy chambers. The 13th century BCE architectural modifications manifested clearly the political and religious importance of the ‘palace’ at a time when the new Pylian polity had grown enormously, creating new dependencies and incorporating new areas to the North and South, thus controlling an enormous land of more than 1000sqm.
Excavated stone foundations once supported complex rooms used for workshops, pantries, and archives, where thousands of Linear B tablets were discovered.
When Blegen and his team excavated at Ano Englianos, they brought to light the most complete and best-preserved floor plan of a large palatial centre in Mainland Greece. It was found just as it had been buried after its violent and final destruction that took place soon after 1200 BCE. The fire that consumed the ‘Palace of Nestor’ left its marks on the exterior of the stone walls of the central buildings, while it was also responsible for the preservation of some of the most amazing wall paintings and artefacts; many dozens of jars, containers of olive oil and wine, found in place, while more than 6,000 clay drinking cups were found fallen onto the ground floor from the wooden shelves of the level above.
Thousands of pottery fragments, or "sherds," were found fused together by the intense heat of the fire that destroyed the Palace of Nestor around 1200 BC.
At the same time, the recovery of more than one thousand inscribed tablets – by far the largest collection of prehistoric documents yet found in mainland Greece – proved the most crucial turning point for our knowledge of the Mycenaean world. The peculiar system of pictorial signs incised on clay tablets, that we call Linear B, was eventually deciphered in the early 1950s by the British scholar Michael Ventris thanks in part to the mass of material found here in Pylos. Soon thereafter it was proved that this was the earliest written form of Greek language – unlike the yet undeciphered Linear A script of Minoan Crete. Thus, the Linear B tablets provide invaluable information on the Mycenaean world - a Greek-speaking culture that covered a large area, from Central Greece via Athens and the Peloponnese to Crete and the Aegean Islands.
This rectangular clay tablet inscribed with Linear B script, details administrative supplies or religious offerings. (Wikimedia/commons)
In the ‘Palace of Nestor’, the majority of Linear B tablets were found by Blegen in the confines of two small rooms, which are just beside the main gateway, and in close proximity to the ‘megaron’ compartments. Today simply known as the ‘Archive Complex’, it seems that this was the place where the clay documents were processed (shaped with water, dried and inscribed) and stored for at least a couple of months. They tell us something about the complex networks of human activity in Pylian society, e.g., the transaction of raw materials (and their quantities) for making perfume with coriander, honey, herbs and cypress resin, or the organization of religious ceremonies and official feasts.
The Archive Room
We learn also about the people who interacted with the palace such as bronzesmiths, shepherds, female priestesses and workers, and a broader elite class. Moreover, we are informed about the geopolitics of the area; the division of the Pylian territory in departments, land plots owned by the local community or by the elites, legal issues or even the presence of foreign mercenaries. In other words, these official records were produced and used by the administrators working in the palace. The Linear B tablets had a short-lived life, and when the registered transactions reached the stage of completion there was no longer any reason to keep the documentation related to them. Instead, the sundried clay tablets, were left intentionally unbaked so that they could be recycled and reused for the next set of transactions. A practical ephemeral state archive restricted to the very few!
The central administrative area of the Palace, showing the intricate arrangement of rooms and corridors.
The story of the ‘Palace of Nestor’ started on this dark and rainy day in April 1939. From that very first moment and for almost a century the lands of western Messenia in the Peloponnese have continued to offer us an immense amount of material with which to unravel Bronze Age Pylos. More recently, a new regional archaeological project based on the collaboration of a number of scholars from various universities and institutions, continues to investigate the area around the ‘Palace of Nestor’. Their excavations have brought to light substantial remains beneath the late Bronze Age acropolis, new monumental beehive tombs, and lastly but most spectacularly the ‘Grave of the Griffin Warrior’; a grave of a single princely man who had been buried around 1450BCE with the most astonishing and precious grave goods ever discovered in the Mycenaean world.
For more on them, though, you’ll have to visit this ‘Palace’ with us in person on our expert-led Exploring the Peloponnese tour. In the end, nothing is more fascinating than visiting the places where all these stories were shaped, gazing at the millennia old human landscape and listening to the secrets of the history written in clay.
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