Treasury of Atreus, Mycenae

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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.