long. Recovering, Orestes returned to Mycenae with Electra to kill Aletes and took the throne. This story is told in numerous plays, including the Oresteia, Sophocles' Electra, and Euripides' Electra. End of the Atreids Orestes then built a larger state in the Peloponnese, but he died in Arcadia from a snake bite. His son, Tisamenus, the last of the Atreid dynasty, was killed by the Heracleidae on their return to the Peloponnesus. They claimed the right of the Perseids to inherit the various kingdoms of the Peloponnese and cast lots for the dominion of them, thus leaving the Atreids as the final rulers of Legendary Mycenae. Modern history and excavation The site of Mycenae appears to have been abandoned after its short-lived Hellenistic resettlement. By the time of Pausanias' visit in the second century CE, he described the site as a 'ruin', though noted that parts of the walls and the Lion Gate could still be seen. Grave Circle A, meanwhile, was already buried in prehistoric times, and is unlikely to have been visible to Pausanias. The site may still have been visible in the 5th century CE, when it was correctly located on the Roman map known as the Tabula Peutingeriana, but the location seems to have been forgotten during the medieval period: it was generally misplaced on fifteenth-century maps, and Cyriac of Ancona, who believed he visited the site in 1447/1448, had actually seen the nearby fort of Katsingri. Similarly, modern scholarship has disproved the claims of two sixteenth-century travellers to have visited the site: André de Monceaux, who claimed to have visited the site in 1669, and the French military officer Nicola Mirabel, who believed that he had done so in 1691. Early archaeological work (1700–1876) In 1700, the Venetian engineer Francesco Vandeyk made the first known correct identification of Mycenae of modern times while surveying the Peloponnese (known to the Venetians as the 'Morea') under the orders of Francesco Grimani, Provveditore of the Venetian armies occupying the region. Vandeyk partially dismantled the debris that was then obscuring the Lion Gate, and identified the tomb now known as the 'Treasury of Atreus', even conjecturing that it was the tomb of a king of Mycenae. During the 18th century, Mycenae was visited only infrequently by tourists, such as the Frenchman Claude-Louis Fourmont, who visited Mycenae in 1729–1730 and drew parts of the walls and gates. From 1796, however,