Transformations at the twilight of the Late Bronze Age Aegean at Tiryns

Speaking for the bicentenary of Heinrich Schliemann, Joseph Maran of the University of Heidelberg examines final palatial and post-palatial Tiryns during the Late Bronze Age. Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld uncovered the upper citadel palace in 1884 without recording find-spots and assumed the Geometric period followed its destruction directly, overlooking the Late Helladic IIIC period of the 12th and 11th centuries BCE.

Maran outlines the building programme of c. 1250 to 1200 BCE, including cyclopean walls, corbelled galleries, a stream-diverting dam, and the Great Megaron's ritual axis. Radiocarbon dates and pottery study show that Building T, which Dörpfeld took for a 7th- or 8th-century temple, was built in the early 12th century BCE around the former throne as an assembly hall.

In the northern lower citadel, where Schliemann's trench narrowed above Mycenaean levels, excavations from 2001 to 2003 completed a final-palatial workshop partly dug by Klaus Kilian. It yielded gold foil, Tiryns-type wall brackets of Cypro-Levantine affinity, an ivory rod with a cuneiform inscription, all three multi-sign Cypro-Minoan inscriptions from the Mycenaean world, Canaanite jars imported mainly from the Lebanese and Israeli coasts rather than Ugarit, and gilded head-shaped faience rhyta compared to Cypriot faience cups and 12th-century masks.

In the northwestern lower town, final-palatial levelling layers above gradual flood deposits held probable Cypriot pithoi and an elephant-ivory workshop. After 1200 BCE a planned modular settlement rose immediately, yielding the pictorial "handshake krater", Italian-related vessels, a krater fragment depicting what Maran identifies as Cypriot bronze tripod stands, feasting ovens, and ritual pits, with an urban layout he compares to 12th-century Enkomi, Kition, and Hala Sultan Tekke.