Back to the Acropolis

I was looking over a great book on the Athenian Acropolis (The Athenian Acropolis, by Jeffery M. Hurwit of the University of Oregon, Cambridge U. Press, 1999) as part of an answer to the question about Dark Age Greece.
Now this looks to be to be a fine combination of scholarship and archaeology, but then I don't usually see any problems with such things as reading texts and looking at evidence.

Anyway on page 71 there's a nice map of what the Acropolis was in Mycenean times, say in about 1150 BC, when the place was rather abruptly fortified.

Now, I guess "common sense" would say that nobody would suddenly build a huge Mycenean-style fortress on a relatively defensible spot in the middle of the collapse of the Mycenean palace regime....BUT, it apparently worked out okay in some way since there is no evidence that the place was taken and tradition suggests that "Athens" (whatever it might have been in 1100 BC) never fell to attackers at the onset of the Dark Ages.

Big Walls

blackpen said:

maybe some king with a big ego decided to build a huge fort that he didn't need

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farfromfearless said:

During the Greco-Persian wars the Acropolis did fall to the Persians who plundered and burned many of the temples. Though the Persians tried to scale the fortified walls, they were instead crushed by rocks and boulders hurled from the heights; however, they gained entrance to the Acropolis through an undefended location and slaughtered the defenders and burned the sacred olive tree gifted to them by Athena.

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Hurwit (p. 135-6) says that, according to Herodotus, the Persians got in via the ancient shrine (and grotto) to Kekrops' daughter Aglauros. But that was more than 700 years after the Mycenean walls were built and more than 200 years after the end of the "Dark Age" (1000-700BC). But the Persians did manage to take the Acropolis when it was defended by old men and temple priests in 700-year-old defenses (except for one new bastion by the main gate).

The Persians made a mess of the Acropolis. Such destructive messes are often good things archaeologically since "destruction levels" allow for precisely dated accumulations of debris that is not altered later. Naturally this doesn't quite always work, especially in a site like the Acropolis that goes on being in very active use, but it gives a good snapshot of what was there in 480BC in terms of statues and dedications.
So, for example, the famous series of increasingly naturalistic statues of Kore and Kourai (maidens and youths) is based on what the Persians wrecked and what the Athenians buried as they set out to take vengeance on the Persian Empire.

Real Fortifications

farfromfearless said:

My history is totally off then, I thought the Mycenian wars came after the Persian wars.

Sort of off-topic, but I always fantasized about creating my own fortress - a citadel really. I used to plan out the greatest little engineered defenses and escape routes, etc. At one point I think I even made a vow to build my own fortress given that I came across some sort of windfall. Oh yeah, and the first floor was a labyrinth to confuse invaders.

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Have you visited some fortifications? I always find them somewhat labyrinthine even without an explicit labyrinthine area.