The death mask of Agamemnon, right? I don’t think so! Why would anyone expect Heinrich Sch

The death mask of Agamemnon, right? I don’t think so! Why would anyone expect Heinrich Schliemann, amateur archaeologist discoverer of “Troy”, to correctly date and contextualize, well, anything? It’s all SO OLD, you guys. It’s really hard to tell. Well, let’s straighten out this mess. Eratosthenes says the Trojan war was between 1194 and 1184 BCE. This is a pretty long time ago and it is during the Greek Dark Ages, so history was pretty shady. For scale, this is 700 years before the Greeks got all fancy and made their name in the Persian wars. It is 500 years before the mythical probably-fake founding of Rome.

So the death mask of Agamemnon? Unfortunately for Heinrich Schliemann and his late nineteenth-century German Romanticism, some amazing Mycenaean goldsmith forged that golden mask somewhere in the latter half of the 1500s BCE, and let us not forget that the Mycenaean civilization sort of collapsed in the 1200s BCE. So when Agamemnon returned from Troy and had his head chopped off by Clytemnestra, some other dead king had been wearing this mask for at least two hundred years, and Agamemnon probably had never even heard of him because the civilization had collapsed and revivified in the meantime.

Plus, why would Clytemnestra let such a daughter-sacrificing asshole wear such a fancy mask?