Taking Home Agamemnon: Casting the Lion Gate Before and After Schliemann’s Excavations at Mycenae
Presented By
The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Archives
Annual Archives Lecture 2025
Speaker(s)
Jan Driessen, University of Louvain
Location
Cotsen Hall, Hybrid Lecture, Anapiron Polemou 9, Kolonaki 10676About the lecture:
Rather than summarizing the data from the recently published monograph 'Taking Home Agamemnon. The Casts of the Lion Gate at Mycenae’, this lecture examines the contextual framework in which the Lion Gate was illustrated and cast before Schliemann’s work at Mycenae and how both illustrations and casts played a role in the development of archaeological thinking on Prehellenic Greece in the early 19th c. I also consider to what extent knowledge of what we now call ‘Bronze Age Greece’ was produced before Schliemann.
About the speaker:
Jan Driessen is emeritus professor of Aegean Archaeology at the UCLouvain, Belgium, and Marion Rawson visiting scholar at the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati. He is honorary director of the Belgian School in Athens and directs the excavations at Sissi on Crete. He also works at Pyla on Cyprus and has excavated at Palaikastro, Malia, Knossos etc. With Tina Kalantzopoulou, he has recently published 'Taking Home Agamemnon. The Casts of the Lion Gate at Mycenae’ (Aegis 28, 2024). He has also published 'The Troubled Island. Minoan Crete before and after the Santorini Eruption', with Colin Macdonald (1997, 2021²) and 'The Scribes of the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos'.