Quickly, the vehicle arrived at the small village that still bears the name Mycenae. After stepping out to buy a drink and taking the opportunity to chat with the villagers, Liang En brought back a palm-sized shard of pottery.
If placed in an antique market, this very rough-looking piece of pottery would be deemed worthless. However, this fragment, said by the villagers to have been dug up from the mountain, revealed the true age of the site.
Similar to the pottery found earlier by Liang En on the island of Crete, this rough-looking shard originated from the ancient Mycenaean civilization, dating back over a thousand years before ancient Greece as we often speak of.
This excavation was conducted through official channels, hence, accompanying Liang En and his team was a Greek archaeological department official.
In addition to overseeing their excavation, the most crucial task of this archaeological official was to help Liang En's team connect with the locals and recruit the necessary manpower.
Because this was a completely formal excavation, Liang En and his team did not start digging immediately but waited two days in the village to gather over 300 workers.
Although the high local unemployment rate made it somewhat easier to recruit manpower than expected, it is also true that the work efficiency of the local workers was lacking.
Fortunately, since all the costs of hiring workers could be reimbursed, Liang En resorted to a strategy of overwhelming numbers, hoping to find what he was looking for in the shortest time possible.
To ensure the safety of the archaeological site, Liang En also arranged for two police patrol cars to be present to prevent any incidents.
While archaeology is a highly specialized profession, many tasks at an archaeological site can actually be assigned to ordinary people, such as clearing the thick layers of accumulation, which is simply a matter of physical labor.
To Liang En's surprise, on the first afternoon of digging, an unexpected reinforcement arrived: the Huaxia archaeological team currently on Crete was willing to send a group to provide support.
This support was somewhat fortuitous, as Huaxia aimed to rotate its personnel to allow as many as possible to gain experience in overseas archaeology, so each team did not stay long in Crete before being rotated back.
Upon learning that Liang En's team was attempting a new archaeological excavation, the Huaxia archaeological team immediately expressed their willingness to send a group of professionals to join Liang En as temporary employees.
They even indicated that if necessary, another full archaeological team would be sent from Huaxia in a week to assist with the excavation.
This was indeed a win-win situation, as Huaxia could train their team while also showing goodwill to Liang En. In return, Liang En would gain a very professional archaeological team.
Thanks to the large number of people helping and guided by the local terrain and images Liang En had seen in his previous life, they uncovered the famous Lion Gate of Mycenae on the second day of digging.
The city they were excavating on the mountain was, more precisely, the acropolis, which usually functioned as a palace or temple, only welcoming people inside for defense during wars, while the rest of the city was built around this hill.
The Lion Gate was the gate of this acropolis. From the focused efforts to clear the area, it was evident that the gate was flanked by sturdy stone walls, with a protruding section on the left extending parallel to the right wall, forming a narrow space at the entrance.
For ancient city walls, the gate was naturally the greatest vulnerability, hence the defenders consciously strengthened this area. The current design of the gate was such.
The two walls on either side of the gate, together with the gate itself, formed a semi-enclosed structure, causing attackers to face crossfire from three sides.
Moreover, the narrow space prevented attackers from deploying their numerical superiority effectively, forcing them to attack in a long, thin line with only a small force.
Despite thousands of years of weathering, which had left the gate tattered and incomplete, the ingenious design of the ancient craftsmen could not be obscured:
Two robust stone pillars supported a similarly heavy, slightly arched stone lintel, above which was a stone arch built of large stones, with a triangular stone precisely fitted in the center.
This triangular stone's bottom concave curve had kept it firmly in place on the Mycenae gate for over thirty centuries, without shifting even to this day, and the core of the entire gate lay in this triangular stone.
On the front of the giant stone was a bas-relief: two symmetric lions, each standing on its forepaws on an altar, with a column resembling the later Doric style in the middle. The heads of the lions and the top of the column had been damaged.
"What a great discovery, this is absolutely a tremendous find," exclaimed the elderly leader of the first group of the Huaxia archaeological team, looking at the not-so-finely carved bas-relief.
"This must
be the true ancient city of Mycenae, because only that legendary city could match this gate bas-relief—"
"Yes, this bas-relief was not carved casually," Liang En observed the bas-relief on the triangular stone. Having studied about the Mycenaean civilization extensively after the last archaeological dig on Crete, he naturally understood the symbolism of these patterns.
The lions symbolized martial strength, the guardians of the city. This also suggested that Mycenaean civilization might have been influenced by regions like Mesopotamia and Egypt, or even originally from the East, as there are no lions on the Greek peninsula.
The column standing on the altar represented the city's religious beliefs, also a form of nature worship, specifically tree worship. Trees signified family and bloodline, indicating that family concepts and bloodline culture were dominant at least during the Mycenaean era.
This aspect is also visible in the famous "Homer's Epic," according to which many of the heroes' deeds revolved around lineage.
This was a distinction from later Greek culture, because although the ancient Greek city-states also valued lineage, mainstream society seldom had kingship based on bloodline continuity.
After a brief measurement, Liang En's team confirmed that the gate was built from a single stone to accommodate cavalry and chariots, making it the most important gate of the acropolis at that time.
The lintel above the gate was a massive stone, about 90 cm thick at the center and weighing 20 tons, thicker in the middle than at either end, with a triangular relieving arch on the stone lintel to reduce the load on the lintel.
Embedded in the middle of the relieving arch was a triangular stone slab, carved with the dual-lion bas-relief. This relieving arch is also one of the earliest known examples of arch structures in the world.
The discovery of this gate excited everyone, as it proved that the site was not just a so-called medieval castle, but as Liang En had said, the legendary ancient city of Mycenae.
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