LEVELING ASHLAR WALLS AT PYLOS: A PROPOSAL

Michael C. Nelson

The northeast façade of the Main Building of the palace at Pylos is one of the longest, preserved walls of ashlar masonry in mainland Mycenaean architecture. The entire wall stretches 44 meters. For 21 meters, two courses of blocks still stand and for the remainder, only one course is preserved. The rest of the wall above has fallen since antiquity, but as indicated by the blocks lying next to the façade, it continued upward with coursed ashlar masonry.

The top of the first course is flat and level throughout its entire stretch. This even surface was absolutely necessary because, not only did it provide the sturdy and level socle upon which the rest of the wall sat, but also the benchmark from which other vertical measurements could be made. The blocks of the first course all have irregular heights although their upper surfaces lie on the same plane. The blocks of the second course were cut to a specific height so that the entire course was 44 centimeters in height. The measurements of the fallen ashlar blocks from the wall also indicate that blocks of a single course reached the same height.

The irregular heights of the first course blocks is odd: why did the builders not begin erecting their wall with blocks all of the same height? The northeast façade of the Main Building was built in several phases with three different styles of masonry: orthostate construction, ashlar masonry and ashlar shell wall construction. The ashlar masonry portion of the façade, most likely built in the Late Helladic IIIA period, incorporates remnants of an earlier orthostate wall, particularly an anta block with a height of 60 centimeters. The builders of the new ashlar wall had to stack two courses of cut blocks to match exactly this height so that a wooden beam could run continuously across the anta block and the new ashlar wall.

If the blocks of the first course were cut to specific, though different heights, the shallow and uneven foundation of small bedding stones must have made the process of setting and leveling the course extremely difficult and time-consuming. However, the builders may have laid the first course with only the blocks' front and side faces finished. After all of the blocks were set, the builders then went back with a chisel and trimmed down the upper surfaces of the blocks en masse and thus leveled the entire course. In this paper I discuss the evidence at Pylos that suggests the builders used this method of construction for ashlar walls.