The J. Paul Getty Museum presents The Kingdom of Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Ancient Greece, an exhibition featuring more than 230 works of art and artifacts from Messenia, an epicenter of the Mycenaean civilization that flourished in Late Bronze Age Greece.
On view at the Getty Villa Museum from June 27, 2025, to January 12, 2026, Kingdom of Pylos is the first major exhibition in North America devoted to the Mycenaeans, who were named after the legendary citadel of Mycenae.
During the Late Bronze Age (1700–1070 BCE), Messenia was a hub of Mycenaean culture. Settlements and the tombs of extended families buried with their weapons and wealth have been found throughout the region. Thriving communities led by warrior-princes set the stage for the rise of the powerful kingdom of Pylos, which encompassed a territory of 800 square miles at its peak.
In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, “sandy Pylos” was the homeland of King Nestor, Trojan War hero and wise elder ruler. Nineteenth-century explorers sought his abode on the southwestern coast of the Peloponnese, but without success. In 1939, the American and Greek archaeologists Carl Blegen and Konstantinos Kourouniotis discovered an imposing structure miles inland, with inscribed tablets that confirmed the location of ancient Pylos. Naming it the Palace of Nestor, they went on to unearth the best-preserved Mycenaean palace in mainland Greece.
“We are delighted that the Getty Villa will be the first venue outside Europe to introduce audiences to the art and culture of the Mycenaeans, who represent the earliest known Greek-speaking culture of antiquity, and are responsible for some of the most spectacular tomb and palace monuments of the Late Bronze Age,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “This exhibition would not have been possible without the many generous loans and close collaboration of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, the Ephorate of Antiquities of Messenia, and the University of Cincinnati.”
Presented in four sections, visitors will encounter a sophisticated, literate culture that became the preeminent power in Greece and the eastern Aegean region. Beyond palatial and funerary architecture, the Myceneans developed advanced engineering, refined arts and crafts, and a system of written administrative records. Close connections with the Minoans on the island of Crete are reflected in several objects on view, which were made by Minoan artists but found in Mycenaean graves.
The first section, The Palace of Nestor, displays finds from the palace and adjacent burials. A complex of four buildings, the ancient Palace of Nestor consisted of 105 ground-floor rooms serving ceremonial, commercial, and residential functions. Near the entry, an extensive archive of clay tablets emerged on Blegen’s first day of digging, each inscribed in the “Linear B” script, the earliest written form of the Greek language. Among the five examples on view, the famous Tripod Tablet bears a pictogram and syllables of the Greek word “tripod,” which gave scholars an early clue to deciphering Linear B.
“Within the Palace of Nestor, a trove of artifacts marks the last year in the life of a Mycenaean state,” says Claire Lyons, curator of antiquities at the Getty Villa Museum. “This ground-breaking exhibition invites visitors to experience the art and science of archaeology in context, through the eyes of the excavators.”
The second gallery, The Grave of the Griffin Warrior, highlights what has been hailed as one of the most important archaeological finds in Greece in more than a half century. In 2015, near the Palace of Nestor, University of Cincinnati archaeologists uncovered a stone-lined shaft sheltering the remains of a Mycenaean warrior who lived around 1450 BCE. He is known as the “Griffin Warrior” from the scene of a mythical griffin fighting a lion carved on an ivory container.
“Tension built the closer we got to the burial deposit…we hardly dared to hope that we had found an unplundered tomb,” recalls Sharon Stocker, co-director of the excavation. Summing up ten years of research to recover, document, and conserve thousands of artifacts deposited in the grave, co-director Jack Davis observes, “The result was more than we could have imagined—discoveries
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the Pylos Combat Agate, likely made by a Minoan artisan and counted among the most exceptional works of prehistoric Aegean art known. Engraved in minute detail on the face of a gold-capped sealstone, a long-haired warrior subdues an adversary, while a third enemy combatant sprawls dead at his feet. It rested alongside the Griffin Warrior’s wrist, and one may imagine that he modeled himself on such a hero, who wears a carved sealstone on a bracelet.
Nearby, renewed excavations undertaken by Stocker and Davis in 2018 brought to light two more tombs. Section three, Tholos Tombs of Pylos, introduces a pair of domed funerary monuments built of stone slabs and masonry blocks, which served as grand memorials of elite families interred over several generations. Although previously looted in antiquity, the burial chambers held artifacts that had been left behind. Ornaments decorated with the head of the Egyptian goddess Hathor and the star symbol of Ishtar, a Mesopotamian divinity, are evidence of the long-distance trade networks that Pylos established from Crete to the Near East.
The last section of the exhibition, The Kingdom of Pylos: Hither and Further Provinces, focuses on ten sites in the Pylian realm, which, owing to intensive exploration by Greek and American archaeologists, is the best understood area of the Mycenaean world. Most finds come from beehive-shaped tholos tombs and include two daggers inlaid with silver and gold figures and a crown from Routsi, as well as burial goods recently excavated at Psari, complete with a boar’s-tusk helmet like one described by Homer. By the late 1300s BCE, these prosperous settlements were gradually incorporated under the centralized rule of the Palace of Nestor, which endured until its destruction by fire around 1180 BCE.
The Kingdom of Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Ancient Greece has been organized by Claire Lyons, curator of antiquities at the Getty Museum, with Nicole Budrovich, curatorial assistant at the Getty Museum.
Evangelia Militsi-Kechagia, director of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Messenia in Kalamata; Sharon R. Stocker, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati; and Jack L. Davis, Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati collaborated on the development of the exhibition and with Lyons, co-edited the accompanying catalogue, The Kingdom of Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Mycenaean Greece, an exploration of the latest discoveries from the dynamic world of the Mycenaeans.
Related public programs include an opening lecture on June 28 by Pylos archaeologists Sharon Stocker and Jack Davis; a Bacchus Uncorked wine program on August 9 and 10; a conversation on August 14 between Dimitri Nakassis and Hana Sugioka about Mycenaean daily life revealed in Linear B clay tablets; and a presentation on October 18 by Cynthia Shelmerdine and Michael Nordstrand on recreating a 3000-year-old Pylos perfume.
The exhibition is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in collaboration with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.
Following its presentation at the Getty Villa Museum, the exhibition will be on display at the Hellenic National Archaeological Museum in Athens from March 1 to June 30, 2026.
