The first season of this year’s excavation on the Trapeza plateau, eight kilometres southeast of Aegion, has been completed, bringing to light, among other things, valuable assemblages of grave gifts and bronze swords.
The site has been identified as Rhymes, a city that flourished in early historical times and participated in colonization, founding Croton in Magna Grecia.
According to a statement released by the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports, Andreas G. Vordos of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Achaea, Elisabetta Borgna of the University of Udine, and their colleagues unsealed several chambered burials in a Mycenaean necropolis dating back to the fourteenth century B.C. The graves, set along the path of an ancient road in northern Achaea, were reused repeatedly into the eleventh century B.C.
Grave goods in the necropolis include three well-preserved bronze swords; a clay horse figurine; vases; seal stones; and beads made of glass, faience, gold, and crystal thought to have been obtained through trade with people from the eastern Aegean and Cyprus.
The researchers suggest that the swords were made in a palace workshop, perhaps at Mycenae.
