Extract

Argos (1) (city), in the southern part of the Argive plain 5 km. (3 mi.) from the sea, at the foot of the Larissa hill which was occupied from prehistoric, through Classical and Hellenistic, to Frankish and Turkish times. A low hill, the Aspis, which has remains of earlier bronze age occupation, formed part of the city. Middle bronze age remains have been found over a wide area (the Deiras ridge, and the South Quarter), and a Mycenaean cemetery with chamber-tombs on the Deiras. Mycenaean Argos appears to have been at its height in Mycenaean IIIA–B (roughly later 14th–13th cents.) at which time the Aspis was fortified; these fortifications were rebuilt in the Classical period. After the disintegration of *Mycenaean civilization, a community continued to live on the Aspis, burying its dead in the Deiras cemetery. By the end of the 10th cent. a new community had grown up on the flanks of the Larissa, and it seems sensible to associate this with the settlement at Argos of a population of *Dorians.