Mycenae

The Greek name of the citadel, Mykēnai, a plural form of pre-Greek origin and unknown meaning, the way the Greeks themselves named the seat of Agamemnon. Homer’s standing epithets fix its character: Mykēnai euktimenē, “well-built Mycenae,” and polychrysos, “rich in gold,” a description the shaft-grave treasures would later vindicate. A folk-tale derived the name from mykēs, a mushroom or a sword-pommel that the hero Perseus was said to have found or dropped on the spot, but this is etymological legend, not history.

Mykēnai is effectively the only name the city has, and from it grew a far larger word. Because the citadel was the first and grandest of the mainland palaces to be excavated, archaeologists extended its name to the entire Bronze Age civilization of the Greek mainland and the Aegean, the Mycenaean, and to the period itself. A single Argolid stronghold thus lent its pre-Greek, half-understood name to a whole civilization, an age, a script-bearing culture, and even a Greek dialect, while the place that bore it first shrank to a ruin on a hill.

The Latin name of the citadel, Mycēnae, taken directly from the Greek plural Mykēnai, the form the Roman poets used for the city of Agamemnon and the house of Atreus that the tragedians had made a byword for doom. Through Latin the Greek name passed unchanged into the modern European languages, so that the citadel is “Mycenae” still.

Mycēnae adds nothing new to the name, and that is its point: the city had only the one name, and Latin merely carried it west. Where most entries in this atlas show a name splitting and reshaping as it crossed languages, Mycenae’s ran from Greek to Latin to English essentially intact, a small pre-Greek word kept whole because there was never a rival to it. The drama of the name is not in its travels but in its expansion at home, from one citadel to an entire civilization.