Pylos: Nestor's Palace

Offsite Links:

An excellent site on Pylos from the University of Erlangen; the text is in German, but paging through the site you will discover numerous marvellous images, including various reconstructions of the palace.

A wonderful virtual tour of the main room of the palace, brought to you by the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project.

The main Perseus Project page on Pylos. It includes a plan with embedded links to photographstaken of the site (click on the little circular things), and a handy page of thumbnail link to images.

Still another good site on Pylos, by the Greek archaeologist Ioannis Georganas; this one has a nice discussion of the organization of the kingdom of Pylos.

Jeremy B. Rutter, a Dartmouth Professor, has a web course on the Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean. Here's his lesson on Mycenaean palaces.

Site plan
The site plan will open in a separate window so you may refer to it as you read on.

Introduction

On the southwestern coast of the Peloponnese the American archaeologist Carl Blegen excavated a Mycenaean palace beginning in 1939. It is the best preserved of the Myceanaean palaces (the top of Mycenae was scraped bare by later inhabitants), and is comparable to Mycenae in its size and quality. Unlike Mycenae (and most other Mycenaean palaces), no fortification walls are evident; but there has been news of late that some evidence for walls has been found.

The site had long been occupied, but the palace remains date to around 1300. The western half of the palace was built first. By roughly 1200 the palace had been destroyed, as were most others in the Mycenaean world.

There was also a town below the palace at Pylos itself, as was the case at Mycenae and other Mycenaean palaces.

Site tour

Note: I here treat up as north on the site plan (when it is in actuality NW).

One entered the palace near point A on the plan, and passed through a door to the north into a courtyard (B), which in turn led into the main room of the palace, the Megaron. It was here, in all likelihood, that the king of Pylos (the historical equivalent of Nestor) would have received officials and other VIP's.

Here is a shot through the court into the Megaron (from Perseus); here an artist's reconstruction of the court (from roughly B on the plan).

To the West of this court were two rooms the excavators called the Archives, for many linear B tablets were found there. The room closer to the door contained a large jar of olive oil, and was probably the office of the tax collector. It is not as finely decorated as other rooms of the palace, and thus presmably had a practical purpose. Tax-payers probably paid a tax in kind by pouring some oil into the jar. When the palace caught fire, this jar toppled over, thus spreading the fire rapidly in this room and preserving the tablets. Here's a shot of the benches in the room left and above B on the plan (from Perseus); here an example of a linear B tablet from Pylos.

Here is a photo of what the Megaron hearth looks like these days; here's a reconstruction of the Megaron.

Here is a shot from the NE of the Megaron, showing storage jars in slots (from Perseus) with the megaron hearth in the background. Here olive oil was stored. Wine was stored in the separate structure to the Northeast.

Southeast of the main megaron was another, smaller, room on the same plan, with a central hearth, labelled D on the plan. It was called the Queen's Megaron by the excavators, without much evidence; perhaps (as they suggested) it might rather have been a room assigned to a favorite son. Here is a shot of the "Queen's megaron" (Perseus).

Just north of the "Queen's Megaron" was a bathroom with a tub (Perseus) found in situ. Recall the bath Telemachus took at Pylos (at the end of Book III, page 522 in Fagles)--which has made this tub rather more famous than it would be otherwise.

For more on Pylos check out the following:

Blegen, Carl W. and Marion Rawson. The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia. Three volumes. Princeton: Princeton UP 1966. [The source of the color reconstructions, site plan, and some of the images on this site.]