The Infant Shroud of Mycenae's Grave Circle A
Among the artifacts excavated from Mycenae's Grave Circle A in 1876-1877 by Heinrich Schliemann and Panayiotis Stamatakis and now on display at the National Museum of Athens is this haunting shroud of gold leaf.
These are not the shrouds of two infants, as some believe based on erroneous statements made by Schliemann that he had found the remains of Cassandra's two young sons, but rather the front and back pieces of a fragile shroud for a child whose physical remains disintegrated long ago.
Nothing like this tiny, gold-foil shroud exists in the Aegean world; the child must have been exceedingly important to have rated such a prestigious burial. In fact, there are no other known infant burials in Grave Circle A. I think the child must have been male, because while there are some very rich female burials in Grave Circle A, none are furnished with death masks. Only the ranking males had masks, and those, unlike this child's, were detailed. Perhaps this infant was a much-cherished heir to the throne, a proto-Orestes who died in the nursery before he could reach adulthood. To cover this infant in gold must have been a way for his family to deny the inevitable decay and destruction of his tiny body.
What we do know is that he was buried atop the breast of a woman (MYC2, III) aged 25-35 who suffered from thalassemia (quite a common ailment in the ancient Aegean) or other iron deficiency. She was the woman buried with the impressive rayed diadem seen below, and must have been the baby's mother, an early queen of Mycenae. Did they die together as a result of some epidemic or other disaster?
The woman herself was not a local individual, though she might have come from another part of the Argolid, the Peloponnese, the Islands, or even northern Greece.
