Along with the rich chamber tombs at Mycenae, certain families, perhaps princely, began building tholos, or beehive, tombs as early as the Shaft Grave Period, perhaps first in Messenia in the 16th century and then in many places in Greece by the middle of the 15th century. The tholos tomb has three parts: a narrow entranceway, or dromos, often lined with fieldstones and later with cut stones; a deep doorway, or stomion, covered over with one to three lintel blocks; and a circular chamber with a high vaulted or corbeled roof, the thalamos. When the facades are finely dressed with cut stones or recessed vertical panels, one may think of a Cretan connection; indeed, one of the tholos tombs at Peristeria has two Cretan “masons’ marks,” a branch and a double ax, cut into the facade to the left of the doorway. The influence of Crete on the southwest Peloponnese is marked. Perhaps a traditional memory of this connection is preserved in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which tells of the god kidnapping the crew of a ship trading from Knossos to Pylos to serve his new sanctuary at Delphi. Excavations at Delphi yielded a snout of a marble lion rhyton (libation vessel), matched best by a complete example at Knossos. The tholos tomb is always covered by a mound of earth, often kept in place by a peripheral stone ring, or krepis. Some tholoi were built on the surface of the land, but most were built in a deep pit excavated into the slope of a hillside. The stones that were overlapped in rings to form the vault in the corbeled system were laid with a narrower face inside, which locked each ring in place. The lintel blocks, often huge in size and weight, were dragged across the hill and dropped onto the corbel rings at the proper height; either a single huge block or two or three slabs next to each other provided the needed depth. Various systems were used to ease the weight on the lintel, such as narrow stone bars or an open relieving triangle sealed by a thin-cut screening stone. The whole vault was sealed with a keystone.
Most tholos tombs have collapsed, often when the lintel cracked and gave way, and their contents have largely been looted. Occasionally the robbers overlooked a pit sunk in the floor, like the rich burial at Vapheio near Sparta; sometimes a whole tomb survived unplundered, like the one at Dendra near Mycenae or that at Rutsi-Myrsinochorion in Messenia. Of the nine tholos tombs at Mycenae, two, the Treasury of Atreus and the Tomb of Clytemnestra, have splendidly dressed facades with engaged half columns in two tiers and coloured exotic stones; they may have been built early in the 14th century, although arguments are made for a 13th-century construction. The elaborate design of the facade may have been imitated from the impressive north facade of the inner court at the Cretan palace of Phaistos. The imagery might imply a continuing presence of the dead kings inside the tomb. Such tombs sometimes mark the gate or main road to a town, as classical tombs did, as though they were “ancestral watchers” or guardians. Tholos tombs were built from the 15th to the 13th century and imply a hierarchical command of labour, of the kind the palace exerted later, according to the Linear B documents. Possibly the capstone was not put in place until the dynast died. These structures could not be built quickly but were prepared with foresight.
While stone-built tholos tombs became the standard resting places for kings and princes in all parts of the mainland to which the Mycenaean civilization penetrated, the mass of the population changed from a custom of burial in single graves, whether in mounds or cemeteries or inside settlements, to the use of family vaults. In some regions, such as Messenia and the frontier area of Thessaly, families built small tholos tombs for themselves. The most common type of Mycenaean family tomb, however, was a rock-cut chamber with a dromos leading down to the entrance. The entrance was blocked with stones and the passage filled with earth after each burial. The rock-cut tomb may have been developed in Messenia during the 16th century under Cretan influence, like the tholos tomb. In the Knossos region of Crete, rock-cut tombs had been in use for communal burials for many centuries before this. Whatever its origin, the idea of family burial in rock-cut tombs soon spread to Mycenae and other parts of the mainland. Some rock-cut tombs in Messenia and elsewhere were carved in the shape of the beehive vaults of tholos tombs. A few large rock-cut tombs, including some of this shape, were used for royal or princely burials. Period of the Early Palaces in Crete (c. 2000–1700)
Crete does not seem to have been affected by the movements of people into the Cyclades and the mainland at the end of the 3rd millennium, but important changes were taking place there. Great palaces of a distinctive type built around large rectangular open courts seem to have been constructed within a comparatively short time at the leading centres of Knossos, Phaistos, and Mallia. The art of writing is first attested for certain in Crete at the beginning of this Palatial Period. These developments in Crete appear to have been the result of local evolution.
Crete advanced rapidly along the path of civilization during the period of the Early Palaces, while the mainland relapsed into comparative agricultural stagnation. The art of seal engraving made great strides in Crete. Hard stones, such as jasper and rock crystal, began to be employed for some of the finer seals. A new and much-favoured shape, which may have been adopted from Anatolia, was the signet with a stalk. Anatolian seals found their way to Crete, and impressions of them have been identified in a great deposit of clay sealings from the early palace at Phaistos. Cretan seal designs now included elegant abstract patterns of spirals and concentric circles neatly made with the drill as well as lifelike pictures of animals, birds, and insects, together with mythical beasts such as sphinxes and griffins adapted from Egyptian or Oriental models. Attractive hard stones, such as gabbro, were used by the Cretan vase makers, although they still used the softer chlorites and serpentines. Some of the fine stone vases from communal tombs in the Mesara region and at Mochlos may date from this period, rather than earlier, in the light of discoveries since 1950 in the early palace at Phaistos.
The fast potter’s wheel began to come into use in Crete about the same time as in the Cyclades and on the mainland. Meanwhile, a revolution in the style of Cretan pottery was taking place. During the Early Bronze Age most of the finer vases everywhere in the Aegean area had been decorated with designs in dark, rather shiny paint—shades of red, brown, and black—on a light surface. Toward the end of that period in Crete, however, there was a change to a “light-on-dark” style of decoration; the vases were given an overall wash of the shiny paint previously used for decoration, and designs were applied to this dark surface in white. This new light-on-dark fashion was also adopted, to some extent, in the Cyclades and on the mainland, but in Crete it was developed much further, and, from the beginning of the Palatial Period, decoration in white was regularly supplemented with red to create a striking polychrome effect. This kind of pottery, which flourished in Crete throughout the time of the first palaces and later (c. 2200 to 1600), is known as Kamáres ware from a sacred cave of that name on Mount Ida, where vases with fine polychrome decoration were recovered at the end of the 19th century. Most of the smaller vases in Crete, notably the drinking cups, now copy metal ones in their shapes and often in their molded or impressed decoration, and the exquisite “eggshell” ware, made in the workshops of the great palaces, with walls as thin as those of metal vases and shiny black surfaces adorned with abstract flowerlike designs in a combination of white, red, and orange, is among the finest pottery ever produced in Greek lands. The imitations in clay suggest that vessels of precious metal—gold and silver—were in general use in the palaces of Crete by this time. A silver, two-handled goblet of this period was recovered from a tomb at Gourniá in eastern Crete. Silver occurs in the Cyclades, and it was being mined during the Bronze Age near Laurium in Attica on the mainland.