The throne room
A large circular hearth at the centre with four columns round it.
**The best-preserved Mycenaean palace in Greece — and the most useful for understanding how that civilisation worked** — on a hill near Chora, north of Pylos. Where parts of Knossos were rebuilt in concrete and Mycenae remains exposed foundations, **the Palace of Nestor survived with its plan complete**: you walk a **roofed gangway** above the walls and see **every room** from above — the throne room, the storerooms, the bathroom, the courts. ⚠ And its most important find is not the stone: **more than a thousand clay tablets** were recovered here, written in **Linear B** — the oldest known form of the **Greek language**. The tablets survived because **a fire destroyed the palace and baked the clay**, preserving it. ✅ They hold administrative records: quantities of oil, workers' names, livestock lists — **daily life from 1200 BC**. ✅ And the site is **fully roofed** by a modern canopy — so no sun and no rain.
A large circular hearth at the centre with four columns round it.
Rooms of oil jars as they were found — a palace administration entire.
A clay bathtub fixed in place for 3,200 years.
Chora, 24001 Messinia, Greece
**The oldest known Greek writing — and its decipherment was one of the great achievements of the 20th century.** ✅ **What it is**: a **syllabic** script (each sign a syllable, not a letter) used in Mycenaean Greece between about **1450 and 1200 BC**. It survives on **clay tablets that were never deliberately fired** — **the fire** that destroyed the palaces baked them, which is what preserved them. ✅ **Why it matters**: until **1952** it was assumed to be an unknown, non-Greek language. Then the British architect **Michael Ventris** deciphered it — ⚠ **and the shock was that it was Greek**, meaning Greek was being written **six centuries earlier** than believed, **and that the Mycenaeans were Greeks** rather than another people. **That changed the understanding of Greek history entirely.** ✅ **What it contains**: **purely administrative records** — quantities of oil and grain, lists of workers, livestock and weapons, and gods' names. ⚠ **No literature, no history and no letters** — the script was an **accounting** tool only, which is why it vanished with the palaces it served.
**The palace is real, the king is a name from Homer — and the link between them is an inference.** ✅ **In the epics**: **Nestor** in the **Iliad** and **Odyssey** is the aged, wise king of **Pylos**, the longest-lived of the warriors and the most given to counsel; **Telemachus**, Odysseus's son, visits him in the Odyssey seeking news of his father. ✅ **On the ground**: a large Mycenaean palace of the **13th century BC** in the region where the epics place **Pylos** — **and its own tablets name the place *pu-ro***, Pylos. **So this is Mycenaean Pylos beyond doubt.** ⚠ **What is not established**: that a man called Nestor ruled from it. The Iliad was written down **five centuries** after these palaces fell, and it is poetry, not record. ✅ **So the name «Palace of Nestor»** is **a modern label** applied by the excavators on geographical grounds — **not a proven identification**, exactly as with the «Mask of Agamemnon» at Mycenae.
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