OCR GCSE Classical Civilisation The Homeric World (Culture) overview quiz quiz

Walls painted all over with brightly coloured images of the one-eyed Cyclopes

A type of fine, expensive Mycenaean pottery decorated with sea creatures such as the octopus

The grand throne room of a palace, with its central hearth and four columns

Walls built of huge, roughly shaped stones that later Greeks thought only giants could move

Two lions (or lionesses) flanking a column

A lively scene of young athletes bull-leaping over the back of a charging bull

An image of King Agamemnon seated upon his throne and holding his sceptre

A large octopus with its tentacles spreading right across the carved stone

Mycenae

Pylos

Tiryns

Troy

Basileus

Tyrannos

Wanax

Archon

A type of monumental beehive-shaped tomb entered by a long passage

A tall defensive tower built into the great Cyclopean walls of the royal citadel

A large trading ship used to carry goods around the eastern Mediterranean

The main hall of the palace, with a central hearth, four columns and a throne

They were accidentally baked hard in the fires that destroyed the palaces

They were carefully carved into hard stone slabs that lasted for thousands of years

They were deliberately buried deep inside the royal tombs to keep them safe

They were copied onto parchment, which survived far better than the soft clay did

It is made of plain bronze rather than gold, so it was too cheap for a great king

It comes from a grave centuries older than the traditional date of the Trojan War

It was found far away in Egypt rather than anywhere in the Greek mainland at all

Agamemnon never existed in any form, so no object could ever have belonged to him

A shallow pit grave dug straight down into the ground with no covering or roof at all

A wall painting that shows the dead person feasting and hunting in the afterlife

A monumental beehive-shaped tomb with a corbelled dome and a long entrance passage

A pottery jar used to hold the ashes of a body that had been burned on a pyre

The Egyptians, who wrote in hieroglyphs

The Romans, who wrote in the Latin alphabet

The Hittites of Anatolia, who used cuneiform

The Minoans of Crete (Linear A)

Heinrich Schliemann

Arthur Evans, who dug at Knossos on Crete

Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B

Howard Carter, who found Tutankhamun's tomb

Around 3000 BC, at the very start of the Bronze Age

Around 1200 to 1100 BC

Around 500 BC, in the Classical period

Around 1 AD, under the Roman Empire

There is simply far too much written evidence from the time to sort through and make proper sense of

Writing was lost, so there are no records, and several causes fit the same ambiguous evidence

Archaeologists have never managed to find any of the Mycenaean palaces to dig up

The Romans came along much later and deliberately destroyed all of the evidence