A remarkable discovery made in the Toumba cemetery at Lefkandi in the early 1980s is the elaborate burial from the mid-tenth century BC of a man, a woman, and four horses in two compartments in a shaft cut into the floor of a large building (Figure 12.5). The man (age 30—45) and the woman (age 25—30) were buried in a compartment lined with mud bricks and faced with clay plaster. The man was cremated, his ashes placed in an already old bronze krater (broad-mouthed bowl) of late thirteenth to early eleventh century BC Cypriot type with a rim decorated with animals and their hunters. Folded and packed inside was a shroud, one sheet of linen folded over and sewn up the side, surprisingly well preserved for this period; placed beside the crater were an iron sword, a spearhead, and a whetstone. The woman was not cremated; her skeleton, with feet crossed and hands crossed at the stomach, was covered with gold jewelry. The skeletons of four horses were discovered in the adjacent compartment.
The building itself was exceptionally imposing, measuring ca. 9m x 50m, with unusual architectural features. Oriented on an east-west axis, it was divided into several sections, an east porch for the entry, an east room, a large central room beneath which the burials were made, a west corridor with a north and a south room off it, and an apsidal room on the west. Three parallel rows of posts held the roof, in the center and along the interior faces of the north and south walls. An additional series of at least twenty-eight posts set 2m outside the building on the north and south sides indicate that the roof continued beyond, forming a sort of veranda, a forerunner of the covered colonnade of later Greek temples. As if the burials and impressive building alone did not indicate the special status of the deceased, the excavators found that the building had been partially dismantled and then filled and covered with a tumulus of earth, pebbles, and
Figure 12.5 Plan, “Heroon,” Lefkandi
Stones. Additional burials continued to be made until ca. 825 BC in an arc-shaped area around the east end of the revered building and tomb site. The excavators have labeled this monumental grave a heroon, that is, a tomb or shrine commemorating a hero, a man of larger-than-life qualities; who the venerated hero was we cannot say, in the absence of written records. But for their date early in the Iron Age, for the connections with the Near East, Egypt, and Cyprus revealed by the grave goods throughout the Toumba cemetery on an island whose role in early overseas ventures was clearly major, and for the striking architecture of the long building, the discoveries at Lefkandi are of great importance.
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