Starting My Treasure Hunting In England

Soon, the vehicle arrived at the small village that is still called Mycenae. After getting off the car to buy a bottle of drink and taking the opportunity to chat with the villagers, Liang En brought back a palm-sized pottery fragment.

This crude-looking pottery shard would be worthless if placed on an antique market, but the fragment, which villagers say was dug up in the mountains, shows the true age of the site.

Similar to the pottery that Liang En found on the island of Crete before, this very rough-looking pottery piece comes from the ancient Mycenaean civilization that we often call ancient Greece 1,000 years ago.

Because the excavation was carried out through formal channels this time, Liang En and the others were accompanied by a staff member from the Greek Archaeological Department.

In addition to supervising Liang En's excavation work, the most important job of this archaeological staff is to help Liang En and the others contact the locals and recruit the manpower they need.

Because this time it was a completely formal excavation work, Liang En and the others did not start digging directly. Instead, they waited in the village for two days to recruit more than 300 workers.

Although it is easier to recruit people in Greece than expected because of the high local unemployment rate, it is also a fact that local workers are lacking in labor efficiency.

Fortunately, all the expenses for hiring workers could be reimbursed this time, so Liang En simply adopted the crowd tactic in the hope of digging out what he was looking for in the shortest possible time.

At the same time, in order to ensure the safety of the archaeological site, Liang En also found two police patrol cars through the professional to avoid any problems.

Although archeology is a very professional job, there are a lot of tasks at the archaeological site that can actually be left to ordinary people. For example, cleaning up the thick layers above is actually a simple manual job. That’s all.

To Liang En's expectation, on the afternoon of the first day of excavation, Liang En recruited an unexpected group of reinforcements: the Chinese archaeological team currently in Crete was willing to send a group of people to provide support.

This support actually has a bit of luck, because China hopes to allow as many people as possible to master this overseas archaeological experience by rotating personnel, so each group of people will be eliminated after a short stay in Crete. Rotate back.

So when they learned that Liang En and the others were trying to conduct a new archaeological excavation, the Chinese archaeological team immediately expressed their willingness to send a group of professionals to join Liang En's operation as temporary employees.

The other party even said that if Liang En was in need, China would send an entire archaeological team to assist in the excavation in a week.

This is actually a win-win situation. Not only can China train its own team, but it can also show friendship to Liang En. Liang En will receive a very professional archaeological team.

Because there were a large number of people helping, and because Liang En could provide guidance through the local terrain and the pictures he had seen in his previous life, Liang En and the others dug out the famous Mycenaean Lion Gate on the second day after they started digging.

To be precise, the city they are digging on the mountain is actually an acropolis. It may be a palace or a temple in normal times. Only in times of war will the surrounding people be admitted into the city for defense, and the other parts of the city surround this Hill building.

The Lion's Gate is the city gate of the Acropolis. Judging from what everyone has concentrated on cleaning up, there are solid stone walls on both sides of the gate. The specially extended protruding part on the left is parallel to the city wall on the right. A small space is formed at the entrance of the city.

For ancient city walls, the biggest weakness was naturally the city gate, so the defending side would also consciously strengthen the defense of the city gate area. For example, this is the design of the city gate now.

The two walls on both sides of the city gate, one on the left and one on the right, together with the city gate, formed a semi-encircled structure, so that attackers would be attacked from three sides when attacking.

At the same time, the narrow space also prevents attackers from deploying their troops to take advantage of this advantage even if they have a huge advantage in troops. They can only line up in a long line to launch an attack with a small number of troops.

After thousands of years of ups and downs, this city gate has become tattered and incomplete due to the erosion of time, but the rough appearance cannot hide the exquisite design of the craftsmen of the year:

Two sturdy stone pillars carry the same heavy and slightly arched stone beams. Above the beams is an arch made of huge stones, with a triangular boulder embedded in the middle.

The concave arc at the bottom of this huge stone has allowed it to stand firmly on the Mycenaean city gate for more than 30 centuries. It has not changed to this day, and the core of the entire city gate is here. on a triangular stone.

On the front of the boulder is a set of reliefs: two symmetrical lions, one on the left and one on the right, standing on the altar with their feet forward. In the middle stands a pillar that is quite similar to the later Doric style. The lion's head and the top of the pillar have been destroyed.

"A great discovery, this is definitely a great discovery." The old man, who was the captain of the first batch of Chinese archaeological teams, sighed as he looked at this unrefined relief.

"This should be the real ancient city of Mycenae, because only that legendary city can be worthy of this city gate relief——"

"Yes! This relief was not carved casually." Liang En said while looking at the relief on the triangular stone. Since the last time he did the archaeological work on Crete, he had supplemented his knowledge about the Mycenaean civilization, so naturally Know the metaphors of these patterns.

The lion symbolizes force, the defender of the city. From this we can also judge that the Mycenaean civilization may have been influenced by Mesopotamia and Egypt, and even came from the East as early as possible, because there were no lions on the Greek peninsula.

The pillars erected on the altar are the religious beliefs of the city, and they are also a kind of nature worship, that is, the worship of trees. Trees represent family and bloodline, so at least in the Mycenaean era, family concepts and bloodline culture were still dominant.

This can also be seen in the famous "Homer's Epic". According to the description in the book, many of the activities of those heroes revolve around blood.

This is also the difference between Mycenaean culture and subsequent Greek culture, because by the time of ancient Greek civilization, although those ancient Greek city-states also valued bloodline, there were almost no mainstream kings who relied on bloodline as inheritance.

After a simple measurement, Liang En and the others determined that the gate was made of monolithic pillars. The gate was 3.5 meters wide and 3.5 meters high, allowing cavalry and chariots to pass through. It should have been the most important gate of the acropolis at that time.

The lintel on the door is a huge stone, about 90cm thick in the middle and weighing 20 tons. The middle is thicker than the two ends. There is a triangular overlapping coupon on the lintel of the huge stone to reduce the load-bearing capacity of the lintel.

There is a triangular stone slab in the middle of the die, with a triangular stone relief of two lions carved on it. At the same time, this Diese coupon is also one of the earliest coupon structural relics known in the world.

The discovery of this gate excited everyone, because it proved that the local area was not a so-called medieval castle, but the legendary ancient city of Mycenae, as Liang En said.