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Bathing at the Mycenaean Palace of Tiryns

October 2012 (116.4)
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Bathing at the Mycenaean Palace of Tiryns

116.4
Joseph W. Shaw
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Among Heinrich Schliemann’s discoveries of architecture at Mycenaean Tiryns in the Argolid Plain in southern Greece, one of the most impressive was a single huge rectangular stone slab that covered the floor of a relatively small square room. The slab’s surface was smoothed down and provided with drilled sockets to anchor a wooden dado. The slab was tilted slightly to provide a slope for water to run off through a carved trough and surely served as an unusual floor for a room devoted to bathing, not far from the Throne Room of the palace. This article deals with the bathing room and, in particular, a proposed wooden bench built along its side walls. It also investigates what we know about bathing in the Aegean during the Late Bronze Age.

More articles like this: 
Architecture
Bronze Age
Minoan
Mycenaean
Greece > Peloponnese

Bathing at the Mycenaean Palace of Tiryns

By Joseph W. Shaw

American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 116, No. 4 (October 2012), pp. 555–571

DOI: 10.3764/aja.116.4.0555

© 2012 Archaeological Institute of America

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