George E. Mylonas

Early archaeological career

After his release, Mylonas returned to Athens, arriving in April 1923. According to Michael Cosmopoulos, who later studied under Mylonas, he may have suffered from post-traumatic stress in the early years after his release. In the second half of 1924, he was hired as a translator at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA), one of Greece's foreign schools of archaeology. The ASCSA had assisted in the evacuation and resettlement of Greek refugees from Ionia and employed many of them in the construction of its Gennadius Library, conducted under the architect W. Stuart Thompson between September 1923 and 1925. According to Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, later the archivist of the ASCSA, Mylonas may have been introduced to the school by Hazel Dorothy Hansen, an American archaeologist who probably studied with Mylonas at Athens. He acted as an interpreter for Thompson and wrote his own doctoral dissertation, The Neolithic Period in Greece, in his free time. From July 1, 1925, he worked part-time as the ASCSA's first bursar; he was also seconded as an assistant to Gilbert Campbell Scoggins, the librarian of the Gennadius.

Mylonas worked on the excavations of Corinth under the ASCSA's director Bert Hodge Hill, who led them until 1926; between 1923 and 1928, he worked with Carl Blegen, Hill's lifelong friend who also served as assistant and acting director of the ASCSA, at the sites of Nemea and Aghiorghitika. Mylonas taught at the University of Athens, from which he received his Ph.D. summa cum laude in 1927. In 1928, he resigned from his bursary post at the ASCSA and emigrated to the United States to study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore under David Moore Robinson, the excavator of the classical site of Olynthus in the Chalkidiki region of northern Greece. He was with Robinson as a representative of the ASCSA, in whose name the dig was conducted, for the Olynthus excavation season of February 17 to June 2, 1928.

Academic career in the United States

Mylonas was awarded his second Ph.D. by Johns Hopkins in 1928; his dissertation was published as the first volume in the series presenting the results of the Olynthus excavations. In the same year, he took a temporary teaching job at the University of Chicago, which allowed him to remain in the US until 1930. On his return to Greece, he directed the excavations of the Mycenaean site of Aghios Kosmas in Attica. The project, under the auspices of the Archaeological Service, began in 1930 and continued in 1931. He also made a study of the topography of Attica and taught part-time at the Ioannis Metaxas gymnasium, a high school. From 1930, he excavated at Eleusis alongside the Greek archaeologist Konstantinos Kouroniotis, who tasked him with uncovering the Bronze Age remains towards the southwestern part of the site and with excavating under the building considered to have been the Telesterion, the focal point of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Mylonas was at Olynthus with Robinson for the 1931 excavation season, having been sent by the ASCSA in response to the school's dissatisfaction with Robinson's excavation methods. Mylonas returned to the United States later in 1931: he was hired by William Abbott Oldfather, the dean of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as a temporary assistant professor on an annual salary of $2,200 (equivalent to $42,400 in 2025). Mylonas excavated at Olynthus in 1932 and 1933, and at Eleusis each year from 1932 until 1934.

In 1933, Mylonas was hired on a permanent basis at Washington University in St. Louis as an assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Robinson had previously tried to maneuver another of his students, James Walter Graham, into the position. Mylonas wrote to Robinson, crediting him with securing him the position through his influence and contacts. Mylonas became a naturalized US citizen in 1937, though spent most of his time in Greece. By 1938, he had been promoted to full professor. He served on the ASCSA's managing committee between 1937 and 1939, returned to Olynthus as co-director of the excavation with Robinson in March–June 1938, and made exploratory excavations at Mekyberna – the port of Olynthus – Polystylos and Aspropotamos, all in Greek Macedonia, in the same year.

Mylonas became chair of Washington University's Department of Art History and Archaeology in 1939. He returned briefly to the University of Illinois for the 1939–1940 academic year, before resuming his post in St. Louis. During World War II, he orchestrated the founding of the Greek War Relief Association, a charity which raised money to alleviate poverty in Greece. He also delivered lessons to officers of the United States Army on the Eastern Mediterranean, and wrote An Introduction to the History of the Balkan States, which aimed to make a historical case against the legitimacy of the annexation of Greek Macedonia by Bulgaria and was published in 1946. He returned to the ASCSA's managing committee in the same year.

The Greek government suspended all archaeological investigation in the country after the war, a state of affairs which continued until 1952. Mylonas spent the 1951–1952 academic year on a Fulbright scholarship, teaching at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (as the University of Athens had been renamed). Simultaneously, he served as an annual professor at the ASCSA; following the suggestion of the chairman, Charles Morgan, that a vice-chairman be appointed in case he was called for military service, Mylonas was given the position. Mylonas also led the school's 1951–1952 "Summer Session" for visiting archaeology students.

Once the Greek ban on excavation was lifted, Mylonas entered what Vogeikoff-Brogan calls "an excavation frenzy". He worked at Pylos under Blegen, where he cleared a Mycenaean chamber tomb in the nearby cemetery at Volimidia; he also worked at Aghios Kosmas, and at Eleusis in the same season. On December 22, 1951, he visited, along with John Papadimitriou, what would become known as Grave Circle B at Mycenae, which had been discovered that November by the ephor Seraphim Charitonidis during restoration of the nearby Tomb of Clytemnestra. Mylonas and Papadimitriou cleared the area of the grave circle between January 5 and 11 the following year, funded by Washington University. Papadimitriou was appointed to lead the excavation, and himself organized a committee of archaeologists, consisting of Mylonas, Charitonidis, Antonios Keramopoulos and Spyridon Marinatos, to oversee the work. The first season of excavation began on July 3 and continued until October 10, by which point seven tombs had been fully uncovered. That September, Mylonas also directed a return excavation of the underwater shipwreck first discovered at Artemision in 1926. He co-directed the second season at Grave Circle B, which ran from July 31 to the first third of October 1953, with Papadimitriou; in this season, a further eleven tombs were excavated. The two returned to co-direct the third and final season of excavation, which Mylonas considered the most productive, between July 8 and September 6, 1954: this time, six more tombs were uncovered, leaving the central area of the grave circle fully excavated, and remains of Middle Helladic buildings in the eastern area of the site were investigated.

Between 1952 and 1957, Mylonas co-directed the excavations at Eleusis with John Travlos: in 1954, his work in the Western Cemetery uncovered the Eleusis Amphora, considered among the finest examples of proto-Attic art. From 1957 until 1985, he led excavations on the citadel of Mycenae. He re-excavated most of the acropolis of the site: Tsountas had cleared it in the late nineteenth century, but died before publishing the results of his work. Much of Mylonas's work on the acropolis concerned the establishment of a chronological sequence for its various constructions, particularly the palace and the fortifications surrounding it; he traced the initial fortification of the site to the fourteenth century BCE, with further development throughout the thirteenth century BCE. He excavated areas of settlement to the north and west of the citadel, including (between 1962 and 1964) a section which he named the "House M Quarter". He also investigated the site's Cult Center, to which he gave its modern name on the grounds of his interpretation of the structure as a focus for religious ritual.

Mylonas held a Fulbright Professorship at Athens in 1954, and spent periods throughout the 1950s at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His M.A. students in the late 1950s included the Anglo-American archaeologist Elizabeth Schofield, later known for her work at Knossos, at Lefkandi and on the island of Kea. He served as president of the Archaeological Institute of America between 1957 and 1960, becoming the first foreign-born person to hold the post, and held a visiting professorship at the ASCSA in 1963–1964, during which he conducted a tour of Crete and offered a course in Mycenaean civilization. In 1964, he stepped down as department chair at Washington University; he was made the inaugural Rosa May Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in 1965.

Return to Greece and later life

Mylonas retired from Washington University in 1969 and returned to Greece. Between 1969 and 1971, he served on the council of the Archaeological Society of Athens, a learned society with a prominent role in the excavation and conservation of archaeological heritage; he was its vice president from 1978 to 1979, and its secretary general from 1979 until 1986. Between 1978 and 1986, he served as chairman of the Committee for the Conservation of the Acropolis Monuments, an organization of archaeologists, architects, engineers and other specialists created by the Greek Ministry of Culture to oversee restorations on the Acropolis.

Mylonas appeared in Michael Wood's televised series, In Search of the Trojan War, in 1985. In an interview conducted at the citadel of Mycenae, Mylonas spoke of coming to the site by night to converse with the mythical king Agamemnon. He once said that the task of the archaeologist was to "infer from withered flowers the hour of their bloom". A Festschrift in his honor was published in four volumes by the Archaeological Society between 1986 and 1990. He died in Athens on April 15, 1988, two weeks after having a heart attack at his home. He was buried at Mykines, the modern village adjacent to the site of Mycenae.

Personal life

Mylonas met Lena Papazoglou, another Greek refugee from Ionia, shortly after his return to Greece in 1923; the couple married in 1925. Mylonas remained a friend of Robinson, his former doctoral advisor, throughout his life; upon his death in 1958, Robinson left Mylonas a Greek vase from his collection and $20,000 (equivalent to $223,183 in 2025) towards his research. According to the Canadian archaeologist Mary Ross Ellingson, who excavated with Mylonas at Olynthus, he was formal and aloof in his manners, preferring to address fellow excavation staff by their surnames and as "Mr." or "Miss".

Mylonas and Lena had a son, Alexander, shortly after their marriage; Alexander died in a car accident in 1959. They also had three daughters, one of whom, Ione Mylonas Shear (born in 1936), became an archaeologist, and frequently assisted her father in his excavations at Mycenae. Another daughter, Eunice (Nike), born in 1934, married the artist and teacher Robert Beverly Hale. Lena Mylonas died in 1993.

Honors, legacy and assessment

Mylonas was a prolific writer and lecturer, publishing around 150 articles in academic journals and delivering over 1000 public lectures. At Mycenae, his excavations uncovered tombs and structures outside the citadel and established the function of the Cult Center within it. His investigations of the citadel's fortifications established their date, while his excavations of the approach-routes to the palace revealed the full extent of the structure. Spyros Iakovidis, who succeeded Mylonas as director of the excavation of Mycenae, credits him with connecting the work of Tsountas, which was prolific but largely unpublished, with that of Alan Wace, who excavated various areas of the site throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The archaeologist Diamantis Panagiotopoulos has called Mylonas's 1927 dissertation the first publication to systematically synthesize the Neolithic material from the Greek mainland and the island of Crete.

Vogeikoff-Brogan has called Mylonas a pioneer in archaeological fundraising; without the large institutional budgets of colleagues like Blegen, Mylonas cultivated relationships with wealthy members of St. Louis society, encouraged his financial supporters to visit and participate in his excavations, and reported his work energetically in the St. Louis local press. Between 1963 and his retirement in 1969, he led archaeological cruises to Greece, whose ticket price included a donation to his excavation work. During his time at Washington University, Mylonas established the philanthropic Mycenaean Foundation with support from American friends and students. The foundation opened an archaeologists' hostel, known as McCarthy House, and a cultural center and medical clinic, known as the Mycenaean Melathron, in the village of Mykines in 1969. He also played a role in the establishment of a new museum at the archaeological site of Mycenae. A scholarship for undergraduate humanities majors at Washington University is named in Mylonas's honor. His personal scrapbooks are held by the archive of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

Mylonas believed in the essential historicity of the Greek mythical tradition; in his work on Mycenae, he attempted to establish chronological dates for the reign of Agamemnon and the Trojan War. At Eleusis, he claimed to have followed the directions of the ancient geographer Pausanias and to have discovered the tombs of the mythical Seven against Thebes. More recent study has suggested that the tradition that the Seven were buried at Eleusis may significantly postdate the supposed date of their existence, and most modern scholars reject the suggestion that the myths of Agamemnon and Troy can be connected to any archaeological material. A contemporary review of his 1966 book, Mycenae and the Mycenaean Age, described his practice of using the mythological tradition to reconstruct historical events as "a dangerous procedure at best". Similarly, Mylonas's contention that he had discovered a Bronze Age temple to the goddess Demeter at Eleusis, following the narrative of the ancient Homeric Hymn to Demeter by which the goddess ordered the construction of her first temple at the site, is now considered unsupported by the available evidence.

Mylonas was awarded honorary degrees by Washington University, the University of Thessaloniki, Ohio State University and Southern Illinois University. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships, the first in 1955 and the second in 1968. In 1955, he was made a Commander of the Order of George I by King Paul of Greece; he also became a Grand Commander of the Royal Order of the Phoenix. He was awarded the Archaeological Institute of America's Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement in 1970. He was also made an honorary citizen of Eleusis and Mycenae, and presented with a golden key to the city of Washington, D.C. He became a member of the Academy of Athens, Greece's national academy, in 1970, and served as its president in 1980. He was elected an honorary fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1978, and was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Published works

As author

• Mylonas, George E. (1928). Ἠ νεολιθική ἐποχή ἐν Ἑλλάδι [The Neolithic Period in Greece] (Ph.D. thesis) (in Greek). University of Athens – via HathiTrust.
• — (1936). "Review: Homer and Mycenae by Martin P. Nilsson". The Classical Journal. 31 (5): 319–321. JSTOR 3291559.
• — (1937). "A Mycenaean Figurine at the University of Illinois". American Journal of Archaeology. 41 (2): 237–247. JSTOR 498413.
• — (1940). "Athens and Minoan Crete". Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. 51: 11–36. JSTOR 45134343.
• — (1942). The Hymn to Demeter and Her Sanctuary at Eleusis. Washington Universities Studies. St. Louis: Washington University. OCLC 217621407.
• — (1947) [1946]. The Balkan States: An Introduction to Their History. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press. hdl:2027/mdp.39015014645280.
• — (1947). "Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries". The Classical Journal. 43 (3): 130–146. JSTOR 3293727.
• — (December 1954). "Mycenae, City of Agamemnon". Scientific American. 191 (6): 72–79. Bibcode:1954SciAm.191f..72M. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1254-72. JSTOR 24943710.
• — (June 1955). "Archaeology in Greece: An International Heritage". The Atlantic. Retrieved January 13, 2024.
• — (1956). "Mycenaean Greek and Minoan–Mycenaean Relations". Archaeology. 9 (4): 273–279. ISSN 0003-8113. JSTOR 41663417.
• — (1957). Ancient Mycenae: The Capital City of Agamemnon. Princeton: Princeton University Press. OCLC 459757596.
• — (1959). Aghios Kosmas: An Early Bronze Age Settlement and Cemetery in Attica. Appendix by John Lawrence Angel. London: Oxford University Press. OCLC 499843.
• — (1961). Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691648873. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
• — (1966). Mycenae and the Mycenaean Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691035239.
• — (1972). Ὁ ταφικὸς Κύκλος Β τῶν Μυκηνῶν [Grave Circle B at Mycenae] (PDF) (in Greek). Vol. 1. Athens: Archaeological Society of Athens. OCLC 563477782.
• — (1973). Ὁ ταφικὸς Κύκλος Β τῶν Μυκηνῶν [Grave Circle B at Mycenae] (PDF) (in Greek). Vol. 2. Athens: Archaeological Society of Athens. OCLC 563477782.
• — (1975). Τὸ δυτικὸν νεκροταφεῖον τῆς Ἐλευσῖνος [The Western Cemetery at Eleusis] (PDF) (in Greek). Vol. 1. Athens: Archaeological Society of Athens. OCLC 1229191075.
• — (1975). Τὸ δυτικὸν νεκροταφεῖον τῆς Ἐλευσῖνος [The Western Cemetery at Eleusis] (PDF) (in Greek). Vol. 2. Athens: Archaeological Society of Athens. OCLC 1229191075.
• — (1980). Ἁναστυλώτικαι ἐργασίαι εἰς τὴν Ακρόπολιν [Restoration Works on the Acropolis]. Πρακτικὰ τῆς Ἀκαδημίας Ἀθηνῶν [Proceedings of the Academy of Athens] (in Greek). 55 (2): 26–58. Retrieved January 12, 2024.
• — (1981). Mycenae: A Guide to Its Ruins and Its History. Athens: Ekdotike Athenon. OCLC 8005169.
• — (1983). Mycenae Rich in Gold. Athens: Ekdotike Athenon. OCLC 11201724.

As editor

• Mylonas, George E.; Raymond, Doris, eds. (1951–1953). Studies Presented to David Moore Robinson on His Seventieth Birthday. St. Louis, MO: Washington University. OCLC 427342596.