Extract

This article covers both architecture and art made specifically to mark and monumentalize the grave; for grave goods (which may be of any sort, and in Greece were rarely, it seems, custom-made for the tomb): see cemeteries; dead, disposal of.(c.3000–c.1100 bce). The earliest monumental funerary architecture occurs in the Mesara plain of Crete, where hundreds of circular stone tholos-tombs were erected during the third millennium, each housing multiple burials. Late Minoan rulers were occasionally buried in sumptuous built tombs, like the Royal Tomb at Isopata and the Egyptian-style Temple Tomb at *Cnossus. On the mainland, the 16th-cent. shafts of Grave Circle A at *Mycenae were surmounted by limestone *steles showing battles and hunts from chariots, and from c.1400 the élite were buried in corbelled tholos-tombs, of which several hundred are known from all over Greece; the largest and most famous is the so-called Treasury of .