After realizing the significance of these ruins, the Greek archaeologist who came with Liang En contacted their superiors immediately, summoning numerous security personnel and a part of the archaeological team.
This approach had the major advantage of significantly accelerating the already rapid pace of excavation. With the benefit of numerous hands, they adopted a strategy of multi-point excavation, drastically shortening the time required.
Thus, within the ancient city's boundaries, they initiated 34 exploratory shafts simultaneously to probe the underground conditions and determine their next targets for excavation.
Having had prior experience excavating the site on Crete, Liang En was now directing the current excavation work. He quickly designated a spot less than 12 meters inside the Lion Gate as the site for the first round of excavation.
In just under a week, they had dug up over thirty square meters of soil, unearthing fragments of stone carvings depicting warriors and hunting scenes.
"These must be ancient tombstones," the Chinese archaeologist, who had been in charge of the excavations on Crete, concluded immediately. "But why would these people place tombstones right at the city gate entrance?"
Normally, civilizations tend to place cemeteries far from human settlements, so having a cemetery right at the entrance seemed exceedingly odd.
"I think these graves were originally outside the city," Liang En suggested, pulling up a simple map on his tablet that he had created using ground-penetrating radar. "As the city expanded, they built another wall outside the original city walls, likely enclosing the ancient cemetery within the new city boundaries."
"Your analysis is quite probable," the elder scholar replied, pushing up his glasses. "At least, the closer the buildings are to the center, the older they are, so the likelihood of your suggestion is not small."
"Fortunately, we now have the opportunity to verify this hypothesis. If we continue digging in this direction and find enough artifacts, we should be able to confirm or refute our guess."
As the importance of the site had been confirmed earlier, a steady stream of reinforcements had been arriving. This included both regular workers and professional archaeologists.
Their support significantly boosted the excavation progress. Soon, they discovered a ring of graves around the unearthed tombstone fragments.
The current findings indicated that the graves beneath were likely to have belonged to high-status individuals from ancient times. Unfortunately, excavating graves, unlike other digs, required specialists and equipment and thus could not be completed swiftly.
Luckily, aside from the graves, there were many other places for Liang En and his team to excavate, such as the royal palace ruins located at the highest point of the mountain and the ancient altar used for burning offerings.
Using three 【Detection (N)】 skill cards, Liang En discovered some valuable items at the royal palace excavation site, such as walls painted with red, yellow, and blue pigments, and a pile of clay tablets inscribed with characters.
The clay tablets were inscribed with Linear B script, a language that Liang En had recently translated and published a paper on, allowing him to quickly decipher the content on these tablets.
Most of the tablets contained simple records detailing various types and quantities of goods transported to or from the palace, but a few mentioned the names of gods familiar to modern people, including Zeus, Hera, and Poseidon.
This indicated that, even after the decline of Mycenaean civilization and before the rise of the Greek city-states, known as the Dark Age, certain beliefs continued uninterrupted.
The third exploratory shaft unearthed a midden, essentially an ancient garbage pit. Among the refuse, valuable items were discovered, such as a fragment of Egyptian faience bearing the name of Amenhotep III.
Given the timeline, these faience pieces were likely remnants of ancient Eastern Mediterranean trade or perhaps left by an Egyptian delegation to Mycenae around the mid-14th century BCE.
Furthermore, they discovered an entrance to an underground tunnel. Although the tunnel had collapsed, the exterior condition suggested it was meant to access an underground water cistern, explaining the castle's water supply.
This also indicated that the people were anticipating possible warfare, as such water cisterns would only be used during sieges to provide water to defenders, rather than as everyday facilities.
Indeed, around 1200 BCE, an earthquake followed by drought, famine, internal rebellion, and foreign invasions completely destroyed this thriving city-state.
The excavation also confirmed this, as apart from signs of war in the city, they found ruins of a small temple to Athena atop the mountain, evidently from a period well after the Mycenaean era, more than three hundred years later.
Such a significant temporal and spatial overlap between two sites from different eras suggested a long Dark Age that had even interrupted civilization.
For instance, they found an ancient cemetery outside the city walls that had been thoroughly plundered, leaving behind a vast underground space.
This was the site known in another world as the Tomb of Agamemnon or the
Treasury of Atreus, a massive ancient burial constructed between 1350 and 1250 BCE, entirely from high-quality stone.
The tomb's passage was about 6 meters wide and 36 meters long; the entrance walls reached up to 13.7 meters in height with a diameter of 14.5 meters and a height of 13.2 meters, built from 34 layers of stone rings, each carefully cut during construction and capped with a huge stone.
Before the Romans built the Pantheon, this stone dome was the largest known in the world. The individuals buried here were likely the legendary figures of Agamemnon himself.
According to previous archaeological findings, the ancient Mycenaeans had a tradition of burying their dead with rich offerings, so normally, the tomb would have been filled with treasures.
However, the current state of the tomb was conspicuously clean, a situation unlikely to have been the work of mere grave robbers. Instead, it resembled the organized plundering of victors after a conflict, indirectly proving that this civilization was ultimately destroyed by human actions rather than natural disasters.
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