Short answers, pulled from the story.
At its peak around 1350 BC, Mycenae and its lower town had a population of roughly 30,000 people spread across 32 hectares. It dominated southern Greece, Crete, the Cyclades, and parts of south-western Anatolia.
The Venetian engineer Francesco Vandeyk made the first correct modern identification of Mycenae in 1700. He was surveying the Peloponnese on behalf of Francesco Grimani, the Provveditore of the Venetian armies, and used Pausanias's ancient description of the Lion Gate to confirm the site.
The Mask of Agamemnon is a gold death mask discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 inside Grave Circle A at Mycenae. Schliemann believed it belonged to the Homeric king Agamemnon, but modern dating places the mask more than three centuries before the events of the Trojan War.
The walls were rebuilt around 1350 BC using blocks so massive that later classical Greeks believed only the one-eyed giants known as Cyclopes could have moved them. The largest stones, including lintels and gate jambs, weighed well over 20 tonnes, with some estimated near 100 tonnes.
Mycenae was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999, together with the nearby site of Tiryns. The designation cited the site's historical importance, its outstanding architecture including the Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus, and its preservation of the earliest examples of the Greek language on Linear B tablets.
Mycenae was destroyed as part of the broader Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BC. The causes remain unknown; proposed explanations include enemy attack, internal strife, and natural disasters such as earthquakes. Unlike many other sites, Mycenae was partly rebuilt after this destruction before burning again and falling into sparse occupation.