The National Archaeological Museum is the largest museum in Greece and one of the most important archaeological museums on earth. Founded in the late nineteenth century, its neoclassical building was purpose-designed to house the growing collection of antiquities being recovered from excavation sites across the country. Today the collection is organized into five major sections covering prehistoric antiquities, sculpture, metalwork, pottery and decorative arts, and Egyptian and Near Eastern antiquities.
The Prehistoric Collection is one of the museum’s flagship holdings and contains some of its most famous objects. Chief among them is the golden Mask of Agamemnon, a funerary mask of beaten gold discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in the royal shaft graves at Mycenae. Though modern scholarship has established that the mask predates the legendary king by several centuries, its haunting golden face remains one of the most recognizable images from the ancient world. The Mycenaean collection surrounding it includes an extraordinary array of gold jewelry, weapons, drinking vessels, and ceremonial objects that illuminate the wealth and sophistication of Bronze Age Greek civilization.
The same gallery houses the Cycladic collection, with its strikingly modern-looking marble figurines from the Aegean islands, and finds from the prehistoric settlement of Akrotiri on the island of Thera, including vivid wall paintings preserved by the volcanic eruption that buried the site around 1600 BC.
Perhaps the single most extraordinary object in the museum is the Antikythera mechanism, an intricate bronze device recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the island of Antikythera. Dating from around the second century BC, this corroded assembly of gears and dials is widely regarded as the world’s first analogue computer, a device capable of calculating and predicting astronomical positions and eclipses with remarkable precision. Its complexity was so far ahead of its time that nothing comparable is known to have existed for well over a thousand years afterward.
The sculpture collection traces the development of Greek art from the rigid, formal figures of the archaic period through the naturalism and idealized beauty of the classical age to the dramatic expressiveness of the Hellenistic era. Among the highlights are the Artemision Bronze, a magnificent statue of either Zeus or Poseidon poised to hurl a thunderbolt or trident, and the bronze Jockey of Artemision, a dynamic depiction of a young boy riding a galloping horse, both recovered from the sea.
The museum’s collections are so vast that they genuinely reward multiple visits, though the most famous treasures can be appreciated in a focused visit of three to four hours with the help of a good guide or audio tour.
