Treasury of Atreus, Mycenae

Assembled from 25 blocks · 1 evidence · 41 related

1. Story
2. A Late Bronze Age tholos tomb cut into a hillside near Mycenae, conventionally dated around 1250 BCE and traditionally but not securely attributed to Atreus or Agamemnon. Its chamber is a corbelled beehive roughly 14.5 m across and about the same in height, built of thirty-three courses of fitted conglomerate stepped progressively inwards and dressed to a smooth curve - which is why it looks like a dome and is not one. The lintel over the doorway is the other reason it is remembered: a single block estimated at well over a hundred tonnes, relieved of the wall load above it by a triangular void cut into the masonry, the same relieving-triangle device used at the Lion Gate. The tomb held the record for the widest and tallest roofed space in the ancient world for roughly fourteen centuries, until the Romans built the Pantheon - and the record was held by a technique that is structurally a cantilever, not an arch.
3. Knowledge
4. Corbelling (the false arch and false dome)
5. Treasury of Atreus, Mycenae
6. The Pantheon, Rome
7. Connections
8. The Pantheon, Rome
9. Corbelling (the false arch and false dome)
10. The corbelled tholos at Mycenae sets a record that stands for fourteen centuries
11. Treasury of Atreus, Mycenae
12. Roman concrete (opus caementicium)
13. Rome
14. The dome
15. Roman concrete (opus caementicium)
16. Hagia Sophia, Constantinople / Istanbul
17. The Pantheon dome spans about 43 m in unreinforced concrete
18. Great Pyramid of Giza (Pyramid of Khufu)
19. The voussoir arch
20. The voussoir arch
21. Treasury of Atreus, Mycenae
22. The Great Pyramid is built as mass, not span
23. The corbelled tholos at Mycenae sets a record that stands for fourteen centuries
24. Evidence
25. Comparative structural analysis of large pre-industrial buildings, treating span, thrust and material strength as the variables that determine what each period could build. Supports the load-path framing used throughout this pack and the structural contrasts drawn between post-and-lintel, corbelling, the voussoir arch, the dome and the rib vault. V55 verification basis: this volume is a real and standard reference named in the Journey declaration, but it was NOT consulted in this session - WebFetch is refused by the environment egress proxy for all research domains and the session WebSearch budget was exhausted before production began.