Tiny stone at the Getty holds weight

A new exhibition on Pylos showcases the artistry inside one Greek warrior's tomb.

- TOBIAS HOULTON AND LYNNE SCHEPARTZ

FORENSIC reconstruction generates an image of the Griffin Warrior.

The ancient Greek kingdom of Pylos is nowhere near as familiar in today's popular consciousness as city-states with names like Corinth or Thebes, but it did get a shout-out from Homer in both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Due west of Sparta, not far from the coast of the Ionian Sea, Pylos was home to the massive, so-called Palace of Nestor - a two-story extravaganza of four buildings with more than 100 rooms in 160,000 square feet, built for a powerful ruler whose connection to the legendary Nestor is just a poetic guess. The palace was said to have provided shelter to Telemachus, son of Odysseus and Penelope and a player in epic tales of the Trojan War's aftermath.

The captivating exhibition "The Kingdom of Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Ancient Greece" at the Getty Villa is the first since January's devastating Palisades fire shuttered the place for more than five months. It's a sobering experience to drive onto the Villa grounds. Surrounding hillsides, significantly denuded of plant life, are dotted with scores of freshly cut stumps. They’re residue of felled trees that burned in the horrific Palisades conflagration. The fire came within a few feet of the Villa, famously a recreation of an ancient Roman country home that was buried beneath the huge volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

The Palace of Nestor itself burned to the ground around 1180 BCE. (Why it burned is unknown.) Ironically, the intense heat of the destruction baked otherwise fragile clay tablets, their deciphered texts — the earliest written form of the Greek language — revealing routine aspects of daily life in late Bronze Age Greece (1700-1070 BCE). A few preserved tablets are displayed in the exhibition.