Gods, Heroes and Tyrants comes to some dramatic conclusions. The Shaft Graves at Mycenae, for example, which tradition said were the final resting-places of Agamemnon and his entourage, are revealed to be just that. The true provenance of these burials was lost because of the application to Greek history of the faulty chronology of Egypt. Since the Shaft Graves contained Egyptian artefacts of the early Eighteenth Dynasty, scholars assumed that they dated to the sixteenth century BC. And since the fall of Troy was place around 1180 BC, it was assumed that the Shaft Graves must contain the bodies of unknown princes who died centuries before the time of Agamemnon. However, the Eighteenth Dynasty actually commenced around 710 BC, and the Trojan War occurred in the same decade; which means that the persons entombed in the Shaft Graves were almost certainly those claimed by tradition. It may even be that the body buried with the fabulous golden face mask, which Schliemann named the “Mask of Agamemnon,” was indeed that of the “King of Men” after all.
The greatest monuments of Mycenae, the famous tholos tombs, are shown to be architecturally related to a style of tomb still being built in various parts of the Mediterranean and Balkans (especially Thrace/Bulgaria) into the fourth and third centuries BC. The Mycenaean tombs themselves date from the late seventh and sixth centuries BC, and were built, not by the dynasty of Atreus and Agamemnon, but by the Dorian conquerors who routed Agamemnon’s grandson Tisamenus. The greatest of these structures, the so-called “Treasury of Atreus,” was almost certainly built for the greatest of the Dorian kings of Argos, Pheidon.