Everyone photographs the Lion Gate, yet a short walk east reveals the North Gate in Mycenae and a stealthy Postern Gate—smaller portals that kept watch over couriers, livestock and midnight patrols.
Built around 1250 BCE during the citadel’s wall extension, these twin entrances expose the daily nuts-and-bolts of Mycenaean security far better than their famous sibling.
Late Helladic IIIB kings pushed the Cyclopean walls outward to enclose Grave Circle A, added new bastions, and pierced the enceinte with two extra gateways. The goal: channel friendly traffic, create fallback exits, and complicate enemy attack lines without robbing the Lion Gate of its ceremonial prestige.
Passage and Bastions
Kill-Zone Geometry
By placing the bastion on the right as you approach, Mycenaean engineers exposed an attacker’s shield-less flank, allowing spear-thrusts and sling-stones to rain down from overhead walkways.
Materials & Craftsmanship
As with the Lion Gate, the jambs are Cyclopean ashlar—huge conglomerate monoliths dressed smooth where they met the timber doors. Pivot holes and bar-sockets remain crisp, evidence of minimal weathering inside the sheltered passage.
Two-hundred-fifty metres east of the Lion Gate a narrow rock-cut stair drops to the lesser-known Postern (often called the “Secret Cistern Gate”).
| Feature | Details |
| Gateway size | 1.38 m wide, 2.29 m high—mirrors North-Gate proportions |
| Enceinte | A short dog-leg entry passage funnels visitors between towering wall faces before they reach the door |
| Purpose | Rapid supply runs to the plain, covert sallies during siege, and access to the underground cistern via a covered stair of ninety-nine steps |
Unlike ceremonial entries, the Postern was about function: limited clearance, no sculptural relief, and a steep, easily defended approach that only insiders knew.
Linear B tablets list pro-te-re-jo—“gate-watchers”—assigned by the palace quartermaster. Two to four men stood each shift, supplied with oil lamps, slings, and bronze spears. A low niche in the North-Gate passage still shows soot stains, testimony to hanging lamps on winter nights, while a small alcove likely housed guard dogs whose bark doubled as alarm.
Picture dawn on a market day: herders lead goats through the North Gate in Mycenae while scribes tally goods on clay tablets. By midday the gate closes; traffic shifts to the Lion Gate where officials levy taxes.
At dusk, a courier departing by the Postern descends the stair, fills water skins at the rock-cut cistern, then slips into olive groves below—proof that the citadel’s safety net extended beyond mere walls.
While the Lion Gate flaunted royal iconography, the North Gate in Mycenae and its covert Postern Gate delivered practical security day in and day out. Their narrow kill-zones, inward-opening doors and hidden water access reveal a civilisation as pragmatic as it was powerful.
Next time you roam the citadel, pause beneath these lesser-known arches and imagine the thud of wooden bars, the hiss of oil lamps and the quiet confidence of guards who trusted stone geometry to keep an empire safe.
