Palace of Nestor

Coordinates: 36°55′53″N 21°43′30″E / 36.931352°N 21.724863°E / 36.931352; 21.724863

Key plan of Nestor's Palace

The Palace of Nestor (Greek: Ανάκτορο Νέστορος) is the central building of a Middle Helladic era settlement surrounded by a fortified wall. The palace was a two-storey building with store rooms, workshops, baths, light wells, reception rooms and a sewage system. The site is the most well preserved Mycenaean Greek palace discovered.

The palace with its four chief buildings, is a work of the 13th century, and its history falls between 1300 and 1200 B.C. The complex is spread out over a fairly extensive area as large as, if not larger than, that occupied by other palaces of the same period on the Greek mainland. In its size and arrangement the central building takes its place alongside the contemporary establishment at Mycenae and Tiryns. It exhibits the same general plan in its entrance gateway, court, portico, vestibule, and throne room, with interior columns arranged a central hearth. It was built by a ruler of great wealth and political power.

No king is identified in the inscribed tablets that have been found in this palace, but tradition tells of a Mycenaean royal dynasty in western Messenia, the Neleids. According to myth Neleus, a royal prince from Thessaly, came and acquired the site, and his son Nestor succeeded him and ruled through three generations of men.

Fresco of hunter and stag, found in room 43

Linear B tablet from the palace at Hora Museum

Location

The site is on the hill of Epano Englianos, situated close to the road 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) south of Chora and 17 kilometres (11 mi) north of Pylos. The Palace is at the top of the hill at 150 metres (490 ft) above sea level and in an area of 170 metres (560 ft) by 90 metres (300 ft).The height had first been occupied by a settlement of the Middle Bronze Age, but before the palace was erected the summit of the hill was apparently cut down and leveled out. From this time on - about the beginning of the 13th century B.C. - this end of hill seems to have been reserved for the administrative center and related buildings.

Excavations

In 1912 and 1926 Dr.Konstantine Kourouniotis excavated two tholos tombs north of the Bay of Navarino. One contained three decorated jars and the other a collection of Early Mycenaean and Middle Helladic pots. A joint Hellenic-American expedition was formed with Kourouniotis representing the Greek Archaeological Service and Carl W. Blegen the University of Cincinnati.^[1]

Trial excavations of Epano Englianos were started on 4 April 1939. From the first day stone walls, fresco fragments, Mycenaean pottery and inscribed tablets were found. A systematic excavation was impossible throughout World War II, with excavations restarting in 1952.^[2]

From 1952 to 1966 the Palace was uncovered with areas around the acropolis being further explored. In the winter of 1960-61 the Greek Archaeological Service erected the protective metal roof over the central building.^[3]

King Nestor

In Greek mythology, Nestor of Gerenia (Greek: Νέστωρ Γερήνιος, Nestōr Gerēnios) was the son of Neleus and Chloris and the King of Pylos. He became king after Heracles killed Neleus and all of Nestor's siblings. His wife was either Eurydice or Anaxibia; their children included Peisistratus, Thrasymedes, Pisidice, Polycaste, Stratichus, Aretus, Echephron, and Antilochus.^[4]

Nestor, who took part according to Homer in the expedition against Troy, provided and equipped ninety vessels, second only to the one hundred ships of the expedition leader, Agamemnon himself. Nestor returned in safety from Troy and survived a good many years.

In the past fifty years, archeology has done much to confirm the historical reality of some of the personalities recorded by the epics and Greek folk memory as dominating the great Mycenaean centers. If there ever was a Nestor, surely he lived in the palace at Englianos, which flourished in the 13th century. Even the name of "Pylos" fits: Forty-six tablets from the site contain this place name, sometimes written in large signs as a heading.

The Palace

The palace is a complex consisting of various buildings. The central unit, more than 50m long and 32m wide (163x104 feet), evidently housed the administrative offices of the Pylos kingdom, storage facilities and residential quarters. It is centered on the throne room, a large rectangular room with a central hearth. This was the principal hall of state, where the king met with elite members of society and carried out rituals.

To the southwest another similar building, smaller than the central one but still of considerable size, may perhaps be the earliest element of the complex, so far as the date of its construction is concerned; but both were certainly occupied down through the 13th century until the whole establishment was destroyed in a great fire not far from 1200 B.C. This building too contained residential and storage facilities and formal apartments of state, and like the Main Building, it seems to have had a separate building that served as the palace workshop, where spare parts for chariots seem to have been kept and repairs of metal and leather goods were carried out. To the northwest, between this building and the Wine Magazine and behind the central wing, there were also some smaller buildings. Blegen and Rawson thought they were perhaps for the accommodation of servants and slaves, but their purpose remains uncertain.

Architecture

Wood was freely used in all parts of the construction of the palace, even the stone walls being erected within a massive framework of a large horizontal and vertical timbers. Columns, door-casings, wainscoting, ceilings, and roofs were also constructed mainly of wood and this abundance of combustible material accounts for the devastating effect of the fire that destroyed the palace. The exterior walls on all sides were built with an outer facing of fine squared blocks of limestone (poros) laid in neat rows with the outside facing smoothed off, while rubble was used for the inner facing. The interior walls were constructed mainly of rubble, though large stones and squared blocks were often used there too. The faces of the interior walls were coated with plaster, and those in all important rooms were decorated with frescoes. The Main and Southwestern buildings were two-storied, each having stairways leading to the upper floor. The latter evidently had walls built of rude brick laid in the usual framework of wooden beams. The roof was probably frmed of wooden beams. The roof over the throne room was certainly higher than that on each side.

Main Building

The principal entrance to the main building of the palace was on the southeastern side, approached across a broad open stucco-paved court. Here where found nearly one thousand clay tablets and fragments,inscribed in the Linear B script. Michael Ventris in June 1952, succeeded in finding the key to the Linear B script, which proved to represent an early stage of Greek. The documents, which can now in considerable part be read, have turned out to be economic and administrative records of the Pylos kingdom.

This spacious hall, 12.90m long and 11.20 m wide (42.3x36.8 feet), was bright with multicolored painted decoration. The floor was laid out in squares, each bearing linear patterns in red, yellow, blue, white and black, and perhaps other colors. Only in front of the thrones was there somewhat realistic representation, of a huge octopus. The hearth was also adorned with painted patterns(flames, notches and spirals) on the riser, a narrow ledge, and the broad border that surrounded the place for the fire (Figure 2). Near the hearth, beside the western column base, stood a clay table of offerings, coated with stucco. The columns, with the their thirty-two fluets, and all the woodwork of ceiling and balcony were no doubt brightly painted. All four walls were covered with frescoes. A preserved fresco of a lion and griffin comes from the wall to the left of the throne; it was probably matched by another pair to the right. Farther to the viewer's right on the same wall was a banquet scene, perhaps the culmination of a procession of men and women leading a bull to sacrifice, which begins in room 5. One of the most evocative fragments shows a male figure seated on a rock and playing a lyre.

Figure 2: Painted patterns on floor and hearth,throne room

Southwestern Building

The Southwestern Building is probably the oldest element in the palace. The confusing ruins on the south western slope of the hill indicate that there were at least two destructions by fire followed by rebuilding, and the disturbance has been made the worse by systematic as well as casual quarrying among the ruins. In the debris two Frankish coins where found, showing that the looting began at least as early as the 13th century. There was also a copper coin (soldo) of Venice of about 1700 and two Turkish coins of the 18th century. The removal of stone continued until modern times; a vast amount of material is said to have been taken from the site in the early 1890s when the main road was built.

Northeastern Building

The Northeastern Building of the palace is separated from the central block and the two courts beside it by a broad ramp paved with stucco. It is a fairly large structure compromising six rooms and a passage, and perhaps a roofed portico with a colonnade. The Northeastern Building was the latest Mycenaean addition to the palace complex. The foundations are of rubble, and the superstructure of the walls was built of crude brick, undoubtedly laid within a heavy wooden framework. This building, like all the other elements of the palace, was destroyed in the great fire.

Alongside the wall on the right is a U-shaped water channel, cut in stone blocks, which carried off the surplus water from a fountain at the top of the ramp just opposite the western corner of the workshop. Here is the terminus of an aqueduct which brought running water to this place. The line of the aqueduct has been traced northeastward to the far edge of the hill. At the place where the water was delivered, there seem to have been several branching channels, one going northwestward toward a reservoir another being carried by a pipe through the wall of the northwesterly court, and a third heading southeastward to what Blegen called the fountain.

Wine Magazine

Outside the Main Building, to the north and parallel to the steep northwestern edge of the hill, is the storage building that Blegen called the Wine Magazine. A doorway on its northern side led into an anteroom from which one could enter a very large room containing storage jars. Four rows, one along the southeastern wall, two down the middle of the hall, and fragments of another running along the northwestern wall, contained more than thirty five capacious jars. Many of them still stand in their original position, though all are cracked or broken, and, since they appear just below the surface of the ground, most have lost their rims and necks through the action of the plow.

Some sixty or more clay sealings were found in this building; four of them bear the sign for wine in the Linear B Script. These sufficed to give the building its name, but some of the jars may have held other substances. The impressions had been stamped on lumps of clay wrapped around strings or cords that tied on the lids or stoppers of the wine skins or other containers that were brought here. In this way the senders had certified the kind or vintage or source of each skin or jar. the sealings were in the doorway between the storeroom itself and the anteroom, where they were discarded when they had served their purpose.

Northeastern part of Citadel

The northeastern part of the hill-top was apparently left open and unoccupied by buildings during the time the palace flourished. Toward the northeastern edge, however, a complex of walls has been exposed, most of which belongs to Early Mycenaean times before the palace was built. What is left looks like a relatively narrow street, lined on each side with house walls running from north to south. These walls seem to have survived because they lie in a slight hollow in the hilltop and were consequently not demolished when the northeasterly section of the hill was leveled off, perhaps in preperation for building the palace.

Farther to the north in the abrupt edge of the hill remains of a geteway have been uncovered. The approach ascends steeply in a broad roadway paved with large stone slabs, laid almost in a step-like system. The gateway led through a circuit wall, scanty remains of which are still visible. Blegen traced the wall along the northwesterly scarp of the hill, but on the other side of the gateway to the southeast and south no certain remains have yet been recognized. On the evidence of the pottery found, the gateway and the contiguous sections of the wall must be assigned to the beginning of the Early Mycenaean period, Late Helladic I. This portal and the wall were apparently destroyed before the palace of Late Helladic IIIB was built.

Palace Destruction

The exact date when the palace was destroyed is not easily fixed to a year, but it occurred when Mycenaean pottery of the style called Late Helladic IIIB was reaching its end, and a few pieces of the succeeding style, Late Helladic IIIC, were beginning to appear. This was a time of great disturbance and destruction, Mycenae and Tiryns too were burned at the end of the pottery style LH IIIB, around 1200 B.C.

Panoramic photo of Nestor's Palace taken in 2010.

Printed sources

• Blegen, Carl W. (1966). The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia I: the buildings and Their Contents.. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691035253. 
• Lang, Mabel L. (1969). The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia II: The Frescoes. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691035314. 
• Blegen, Carl W.; Rawson, M.; Taylor, W.; Donovan, W. (1973). The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia III:Acropolis and Lower, tholoi, Grave Circles and Chamber Tombs, Discoveries Outside the Citadel.. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691035291. 
• Blegen, Carl William; Rawson, Marion; Davis, Jack L.; Shelmerdine, Cynthia W. (2001), A guide to the Palace of Nestor: Mycenaean sites in its environs and the Chora Museum (2 ed.), ASCSA, ISBN 9780876616406 
• Chadwick, John (1976). The Mycenaean World. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521290371. 
• Davis, Jack L. (2008). Princeton:American School of Classical Studies at Athens. 
• Shelmerdine, Cynthia W.; Palaima, Thomas G. (1984), Pylos Comes Alive: Industry and administration in a Mycenaen Palace : Papers of a Symposium sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America Regional Symposium Fund., New York : Fordham University 

Footnotes

1. ^ (Blegen et al. 2001, p. 3)
2. ^ (Blegen et al. 2001, p. 4)
3. ^ (Blegen et al. 2001, p. 5)
4. ^ Apollodorus. Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Includes Frazer's notes.

External links

• Pylos Project, University of Minnesota
• Garland, Robert (2008), Daily life of the ancient Greeks (2 ed.), ABC-CLIO, ISBN 9780313358142, http://books.google.com/books?id=jyxtMKYIBysC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Daily+life+of+the+ancient+Greeks&hl=el&ei=o-HaTJrWKNmd4AbJysGRCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=nestor%27s%20palace&f=false