Special Sub-Topic: The House of the Tiles at Lerna Click Here To Play: The House of the Tiles at Lerna

Lerna is located in this fertile region of the Peloponnese, home to the larger and more powerful sites of Argos, Tiryns, and Mycenae.

The Argolid. Lerna is located on the Argolic Gulf. Tiryns is located on the opposite side of the gulf, and the two sites, whether friends or rivals, would have had a clear view of each other. Argos would have been a short distance away by land. As far as locations go, Lerna was a nice place-- near the sea for trade, water sources nearby, and on a hill that catches cool breezes off the gulf in the summer. Nowadays, the site is in the middle of a citrus grove. It is really quite lovely.

The earliest structure at Lerna, a small house with stone foundations, dates to the Middle Neolithic period. About how long ago was this?

7000 BC. Lerna was first settled in the Early Neolithic, about the time the first farming communities began to appear in Greece. The site flourished in the Middle Neolithic. The people grew various grains, kept domesticated animals; they also hunted, fished, and gathered shellfish for food. They used pottery made without the use of a potter's wheel, and also made clay figurines of women. There are few remains from the Late and Final Neolithic periods.

About 3000 BC, during the Early Helladic II period, the settlement at Lerna began to flourish. The residents built a number of small houses and encircled the settlement with a fortification wall. What materials, the standard construction materials even into the Mycenaean Age, were used to build this fortification wall?

Unfired mudbrick walls on stone foundations. Foundations and the lower parts of the walls were built of stone. The stones in each course rest on each other at an angle from the upright. The direction of the tilt alternates for each new course. This gives something of a herringbone pattern, a very distinctive marker of Early Helladic architecture. The upper parts of the walls were made out of unfired mudbrick, held together and connected to the stone foundations with timbers. Unfired mudbrick "melts" when exposed to the elements. The mudbrick is only preserved if accidentally fired, say in the fire that destroyed the building. This happened at Lerna. It is one of the few sites where you can actually see several feet of mudbrick wall preserved on top of the stone foundations.

After some period of time, the circuit walls went out of use, and construction began on a large new structure at the center of the settlement-- the House of the Tiles. Which of these statements about the House of the Tiles is NOT correct?

The central room housed a stone throne. The House of the Tiles is an Early Helladic "corridor house." As the name suggests, two corridors run along the length of the walls of the building. There are two large interior rooms, several smaller rooms, and stairways leading to the upper story. The floors were made out of fine yellow clay, and the walls were covered with plaster. The tiles that give the building its name covered the roof. The function of the building is unknown. The design of the three corridor houses known, at Lerna, Aigina, and Akovitika, is quite similar-- the sites must have shared the same culture.

The House of the Tiles was destroyed in a large fire. At the time, all of the structural elements had been completed, including the roof. However, the walls of the ground floor had not been fully plastered, and only a few artifacts and pieces of pottery were found inside the building. Was the House of the Tiles probably finished at the time it was destroyed?

n. So goes the reasoning that it was not. One of the rooms, at least, was in use. Dozens of clay sealings-- lumps of clay covered with the impressions of seal rings-- were found in a small room with a doorway to the outside. The sealings would have originally have been placed on pots, baskets, or boxes of goods to indicate the place of origin and that the contents had not been tampered with. The Lernians, it seems, had a highly developed system of trade.

We know for certain that waves of invaders caused the general destruction of the House of the Tiles and the rest of the Lerna settlement at the end of the Early Helladic II period. But who exactly were these invaders?

Greeks. The invaders were Greeks, that is, Greek-speaking peoples. The culture that existed before the arrival of the Greeks, so far as we can tell from a number of non-Greek place names, was not even Indo-European. The Greeks brought with them the potter's wheel and a distinctive house plan, which is detailed in the next question.

The invaders settled in Lerna during the Early Helladic III period, bringing their own distinctive architectural style. Houses consisted of three rooms in a row. The first room was basically a covered porch. It was used for craft production and cooking, things that needed light and had a risk of burning the house down. The family slept in the middle room. They kept their most valuable possessions-- their livestock-- in the third room, which could only be entered through the sleeping area. This three-room-in-a-row floor plan gave rise to which staple of Mycenaean palace architecture?

Megaron. Mycenaean megarons always feature an entry area and a large courtyard before the megaron proper. This floor plan may also have given rise to the floor plan of classical Greek temples.

The invaders seem to have recognized that the House of the Tiles was special (after they had burned it down, unfortunately). They covered it with an artificial circular mound, outlined with stones and centered on the structure exactly. What is this sort of artificial circular mound known as?

Tumulus. The tumulus seems to have been set aside as "special" for a long time, because there were no other structures built on top of it. Only later did houses begin to be built on the sides of the tumulus, perhaps after the reason for covering the House of the Tiles had been forgotten.

We skip the Middle Helladic period, since life continued in much the same way as it had in the Early Helladic III period. In the beginning of the Late Helladic period, better known as the Mycenaean period, several Mycenaean shaft graves were sunk through the Early Helladic III tumulus and the House of the Tiles itself. These shaft graves were contemporary to the shaft graves of Grave Circle A and Grave Circle B from which other famous Mycenaean site nearby?

Mycenae. The chambers at the bottom of the shaft were lined with small white pebbles. The only items found in them were two stone cups. Either the graves were robbed in antiquity, or the inhabitants of the site purposefully moved the remains.

Even after all the excitement with the House of the Tiles, the tumulus, and the shaft graves, Lerna only makes a cameo appearance in Greek mythology. Which hero slayed the Lernian Hydra as his second labor?

Hercules & Heracles. Lerna, now as then, is a very swampy region, with numerous streams feeding into the Gulf of Argos. There is some speculation that the Hercules myth reflects an attempt to dam up the streams. After all, "Hydra" only means "water monster," and if you try to dam up a stream, it splits into two around the dam, like the Hydra sprouting two new heads for every one the Herc cut off. And Hercules himself was no stranger to hydrological engineering - was he? - with the Augean Stables.