In 1876, Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman with a burning interest in the classics, began excavating a site on the Greek mainland, about seventy miles southwest of Athens. The site he chose was fabled as the home of Mycenae, the ancient city known from Homer as the kingdom of Agamemnon, brother-in-law of the beautiful Helen of Troy. As Evans would on Crete a quarter century later, Schliemann unearthed the relics of an advanced Bronze Age civilization, this one lying two hundred miles north of Crete, over the sea. Mycenae had been a real, prosperous, well-run society that flourished in the second millennium B.C. Before long, the most visible Bronze Age ruins there could be dated to about 1600 to 1200 B.C.: In the late 1880s and afterward, the distinguished archaeologist Flinders Petrie uncovered Mycenaean trade goods, including ceramic vessels, while excavating Egyptian sites of known date. Schliemann was already famous for unearthing vanished worlds. In the early 1870s, he had uncovered what he believed to be Troy itself, at Hisarlik, in present-day Turkey.
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