Cyclopean masonry facts for kids

Imagine giant walls built from huge, rough stones, fitted together so tightly that you can barely see any gaps, and often without any sticky mortar! This amazing ancient building style is called Cyclopean masonry. It's named after the mythical one-eyed giants, the Cyclopes, because ancient Greeks believed only creatures that strong could have moved such enormous rocks!

You can see famous examples of these walls at ancient cities like Mycenae and Tiryns in Greece. They were often used to build strong fortress walls. This style of building is also found in other places, like the ancient walls of Rajgir in India.

Building with Giant Stones

The walls of Cyclopean masonry are usually built on very shallow foundations carved into the natural rock. The builders used huge, rough limestone boulders. They fitted these giant stones together as closely as possible. Any small spaces between the big boulders were filled with smaller pieces of limestone.

The outside surfaces of the large boulders might have been slightly smoothed with a hammer. However, the stones were never carefully cut into perfect shapes. The biggest boulders are found in the walls of places like Mycenae, Tiryns, and the Acropolis of Athens. Some sites, like Midea, used slightly smaller boulders. At Gla, large flat limestone slabs were common.

Interestingly, more carefully cut stones were usually only used around important entrances or gateways, like at Mycenae and Tiryns.

Where Can You Find Cyclopean Walls?

Cyclopean masonry was a very important building style in the Bronze Age, especially for strong fortresses. The famous Lion Gate at Mycenae, for example, shows how impressive these entrances could be.

Besides the walls at Tiryns and Mycenae, you can find other Cyclopean structures in Greece. These include some ancient beehive tombs and the fortifications at many Mycenaean sites, like the large fortress at Gla.

This building style wasn't just in Greece!

• In Cyprus, Cyclopean walls have been found at archaeological sites like Kition (in modern-day Larnaca), Nitovikla, Enkomi, and Maa Paleokastro.
• In Italy, this type of wall is common in the Latium region. Famous sites with these walls include Norba, Signia, Alatri, and Palestrina. The "acropolis" (high city) in Alatri is one of the largest Cyclopean structures in Europe, after Athens.
• In Sicily, many Cyclopean structures can be seen, especially in Erice.
• The ancient Nuraghe towers of Sardinia and some buildings of the Talaiot culture on Menorca and Mallorca are also built with this style.
• In India, the ancient city of Rajgir (now in Bihar) also has Cyclopean walls.

Images for kids

• 

  Stone wall, Ireland.

• 

  A polygonal wall, excavated at Delphi in 1902.

• 

  The Lion Gate, at Mycenae, with equal-height courses of unequal-width stones

• 

  Walls at Ramnous, Attica; some are made of rectangular, but irregular stones

See also

• Dry stone
• Megalithic architecture
• Stone masonry
• Stone wall