"I have seen the face of Agamemnon"

This morning, my Aegean and Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology class took a trip to the National Archeological Museum again. This time, we were looking at the Mycenaean collection, specifically the stuff that was found in Grave Circles A and B. Let me just tell you, it was a lot of gold. They found something like 14 kilos of sheet gold between the two grave circles, and about a quarter of it is on display at the moment. It was to the point where my instructor was going, "and in this case we have more gold. Isn't that nice? Now moving on to the next case..." It was pretty though. I got to see the most famous of the pieces found in the Grave Circles, the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, which my instructor told us that they couldn't be sure if what it looks like now is what it originally looked like, as Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated Mycenae, had been known to have a jeweler "improve" on what he found, and the face depicted in the Mask of Agamemnon allegedly bears an uncanny resemblance to Schliemann himself. Two of my friends also did a presentation on Linear B, in front of the case of Linear B texts. I'll spare you the details of Linear B, unless anyone expresses an interest in knowing, but basically Linear B is a syllabary used to keep temporary Mycenaean inventories and records, and is the earliest known text used to write Greek. I also learned how to write my name in Linear B, which is useful as we have been informed that that will be the first question on the final exam. Unfortunately, Linear B doesn't have a way to write /l/, which makes spelling my name a little awkward. It ends up sounding a lot like Japanese, actually, because what I came up with was "ra-ra po-ra-ka". It looks something like this:

Pretty cool, eh?