Rethinking the Mycenaean World

it's it's great to be here on what's probably the craziest day of my life so far so yes it's been really crazy and really nice and this is my first real trip to Western Illinois / Eastern Iowa as I should say to and it's been really nice to be here and to stay with Kherson and Shawn catch up with old friends and making some new ones just one little word I have two little words actually before I get started the first is that if you're not a member of the archaeological Institute of America and you think you might like to be one you want to join it's a big organization it's a diverse organization that advocates and educates all kinds of optical archaeology of every kind there's a tendency to think that the AIA is largely classical or coterminous with classical archaeology and that tends to be more true on the academic wing of the AIA but in terms of the larger mission of the AIA that's really not the case it really covers all kinds of archaeology new world old world Africa Asia and so on and so forth so I would urge you if you think that you're interested to look into it the wizard's website archaeological org where you can find all kinds of information about membership plans included including discounted membership plans for students and why are you not being convinced sorry okay there we go and your membership brings lecturers like me to Western Illinois so you can hear about Mycenaeans and other kinds of things so you'll actually be helping yourself if you do join the AIA and if you do join make sure to join the Western Illinois chapter don't join you know the Chicago chapter or the new Anto chapters um the other thing is I am we're contractually obliged to and I want to actually talk about the fact that I'm the rod penis young lecturer this year for the AIA so the this lectureship was established in 1976 by the Philadelphia society and the Rodney s young alum Oriole lecture was given in Philadelphia annually thereafter but in 2001 thanks to the generous donations from AIA members nationwide this lectureship was made part of the program administered by the IAS headquarters with lectures given around the country Rodney SEM earned his PhD in classics and archaeology from Princeton in 1940 excavating in the Athenian Agora and elsewhere in Greece as a student he became curator of the Mediterranean section of the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of archeology and anthropology and he was professor of classical archaeology at UPenn in 1950 in the same year he became he began new excavations in Gordian turkey right King Midas and all that good stuff where he directed which he directed until his death in 1974 who's president of AIA from 68 to 72 and he was the North lecturer of 68 and 69 his interest included Greek and Phrygian archaeology and history the early Iron Age and early writing and in addition to these subjects he of strong interest in the Mediterranean of his own day he raised money for and he drove an ambulance in Greece after the Italian invasion in 1940 and he headed the Greece desk for Allied intelligence in Cairo after the u.s. entered the war so he's one of these archaeologists spies and he served as a special assistant for post-war humanitarian relief in Greece so a distinguished scholar is my honor to be the young lecturer and it's worth pointing out that I think something like 80 percent of the lecturers that are sent out by the nationwide chapter of the AIA are supported by endowed lectureships like the Rodney Young lectureship so should you choose to give money to the AIA your money would go to support outreach outreach programs like this lecturers like this so there's you can see a direct impact with your donations to the core mission okay so that's sort of prelude to the the newest journey for scholars of the Mycenaean world entitled pacify a is odd in at least two ways first it's named for a mythological woman who copulated with a bull to produce a monstrous child the man-eating Minotaur not really the most auspicious name for a journal at least not the name I would bet second and most seriously more seriously rather is its statement of purpose and I quote and for those of you who have a tongue there's the attack the Mycenaean world out of whose ruins Greek classical civilization emerge is known through the archaeological excavations of Mycenae turrents pilos and thieves and thanks to the decipherment of Linear B a syllabic writing system pacify a has the aim of illustrating this rigidly hierarchical and centralized world that's my emphasis through the publication of original texts the result of archaeological research and a historical villa logical linguistic and economic studies I want to focus on this phrase this rigidly hierarchical and centralized world it might seem odd to you to celebrate the study of rigid hierarchy it certainly does to me and actually this is more or less the accepted orthodoxy for the region and the period that the drum covers briefly stated the Aegean Basin in the Late Bronze Age so about 1600 to 1200 BC is that is the region that we're talking about oh sorry didn't go forward forward so oh no why because I didn't turn this on I'm really a genius so this is the Aegean Basin here so closely we'll be talking about southern Greece and to a lesser extent the island of Crete down here for instance a prominent Mycenaean archeologist wrote in 1996 that and I quote the palaces of the Greek mainland radically centralized all economic administrative and bureaucratic operations and the non alized all aspects of public life the emergence of the Mycenaean Palace states was further accompanied by the establishment of a centralized monarchy the documents of the palace administration also testified to the fact that all affairs of state and all economic matters were under the paramount control of the Monarchs unquote in my talk today I will make the argument that this image of the Mycenaean social political economic order needs to be radically revised now come on in sorry and I will focus particularly on society there are two parts of my argument the first is a critique of traditional models of Mycenaean society on methodological and empirical grounds the second is a suggestion for one way we can move towards a better model of Mycenaean society so before I do that I should probably provide a brief survey a very brief survey about what I'll be covering in the basis for my claims so first of all the term mics a.m. is a term that Greek archaeologists and historians used to cover the entirety of the Late Bronze Age in Greece so about 1600 to 1200 BCE or even into 1100 probably better geographically the term mycenean is applied to much of the Greek mainland it also includes the islands especially Crete which may have been invaded by Mycenaeans around 1500 BC that's a controversial position but it doesn't affect any of my claims here beginning and around 1400 BC the first Mycenaean palaces are built and their emergence is coincident with the use of the Mycenaean writing system so here are many of the major palatial sites of the Mycenaean world including you'll notice a new one that a lot of people have been asking about I use epoxy leo is very close to ancient and modern Sparta which is a new site that's been excavated over the last couple of years okay Mycenaeans used a syllabic script which we call the near b which was used exclusively by palatial authorities for economic and administrative purposes it's decipherment by Michael Ventris in 1952 demonstrated that it was used to write an early form of the Greek language in addition to the important linguistic consequences of cybermen it also really changed that that might change the way that the Mycenaeans were interpreted so prior to the decipherment the archaeological record was combined with evidence from Homer to come up with a complete sort of complete not complete a composite picture of Mycenaean politics and society and the decipherment changed all that the world the linear b tablets revealed shared little with the Homeric poems so it's really big change in the way that Mycenaeans were understood so far as we could tell the Mycenaean world was not politically unified instead you had a handful of polities independent from each other but using very similar cultural forms so pottery architecture writing and so although initially the similarities were so great that scholars sports folk of Koine there's now increasing appreciation for variation in ceramic styles administrative organization and so on Mycenaean colonies were generally not very large nor were they very populous so Pylos for example the Mycenaean centre that we understand bats than the one that I understand best seems to have controlled an area about 2,000 square kilometers that's about the size of a sort of regular Midwestern County with a population estimated at 50,000 people in this think where I'm going to focus on the site of high loss around 1200 BC there are two good reasons for this the first is that piles of the palatial center that we understand the best both archaeologically and textually the Texan piles of the best preserved in the Mycenaean world because the site was virtually abandoned after the destruction of the palace and because it was expertly excavated as you'll see my method requires fairly coherent set texts the second reason which is related to the first is that Pylos provides the best evidence for Mycenaean social organization almost every synthesis of Mycenaean Society actually describes pelion society society so it's logical to begin re-evaluation of bison and society with pilos the date 1200 BC is not my choice virtually all of the documents from pylos there are some exceptions but they're few a number date to 1200 BC indeed they date to the last couple of months prior to the final struction palace so in some ways I'm not just talking about one Mycenaean Center at the very end the Mycenaean period oh sorry in some ways I am really just talking about what nice enhance center at the bay area at the Mycenaean period itself right now my conclusion should not therefore be simply applied uniformly to halt Mycenaean centres across time and space on the other hand it's also the case that the traditional orthodoxy is based on the same data set that I'm using so although my discussion is limited to a single site in a single year it has very broad implications for the study of the Mycenaean world so yeah this is where Pylos is and then here's a zoomin map with a pre constructed boundary of the state of Pylos that basically corresponds to the modern administrative district of Messenia okay let me move on then to the traditional model of Mycenaean society the social economic structures of the Mycenaean world have been described in terms of strict hierarchy since the decipherment of Linear B sir Moses Finley and in flew in an influential article written just after the sacraments in 1957 aren't you that the palatial economy was a redistributed system in which the center virtually monopolized and coordinated all production consumption and exchange and his model remains influential such extreme economic centralization is difficult to imagine the absence of a social structure that's correspondingly rigid in fact Finley described the Mycenaeans in precisely the same way that he describes contemporary Near Eastern Kingdoms rigid top-down structures so just one close linear b tablets reveal a massively distributed operation operation in which all personnel and all activities all movements of both persons and goods so to speak we're headed Ministry of Lee fixed ok traditional studies of Mycenaean society therefore always begin with the 1 ox the cane there is a top of the pyramid and then move to other offices don't the textual evidence this approach is explicitly bureaucratic offices are isolated this isn't usually hard because there are Mycenaean names for most of these offices their functions are determined if possible and then individual offices are placed in a schematic chart like this one which I've redrawn from a classic article in Mycenaean our geology and updated to reflect current thing so you have top of the pyramid the gods I guess the one access this human intermediary between the gods and the rest of societies this guy called a lot of get tossed who might be the sort of military commander of the Mycenaean world then some other officers including priests and priestesses and then at the bottom slaves or dependent what I call dependent laborers local communities and Smith's okay the opposites are usually divided into two or three groups but usually three you have palatial administrators right here at the top whose authority is polity wide local administrators with regional authority and non elites with no titles and no authority elites are therefore defined as those who hold an official title within the palatial administration and so they constitute a relatively small group there are about 20 palatial administrators and another 80 or so local administrators so we've been talking about a hundred guys and a couple of girls running the whole kingdom in this traditional model this model is depressingly generic such so much so that if we accept it there's virtually no point in talking about Mycenaean official we could just plug in the generic model that's typically applied to early States Bruce trigger for example right and his in his comparative study of early civilizations that I quote the highest date of visuals belong to the upper classes and together with the king they made all the most important decisions members of this group also committed the army and managed the major religious institutions less prestigious members the nobility were minor officials and so on and so forth right so this model of Mason officialdom basically just corresponds to the way that a lot of archaeologists think about the earliest states top-down hierarchical a couple of guys in control and then you know you've got some losers about basically just take order to the top I suppose that some would see that as confirmation of its truth that is to say the Mycenaean case corresponds to the comparative framework drawn out by trigger and in fact a prominent archeologist recently said as much in his blog according to him the Maya can't have a middle class because all ancient civilizations had two classes elites anomalies okay great so we don't need evidence after all um but there are a number of problems with the usual picture of this two-tier or even three-tiered Mycenaean social structure in fact it's hard to take the textual data at face value Mycenaean documents don't provide an even or thorough picture of Mycenaean society in large part because the authors of these documents were interested in composing short and efficient economic records not in helping us to understand Mycenaean society official tales are only included on texts where they're somehow necessary to the administrative purpose of the document so here's a list of Smith's who are going to do some metallurgical work for the palace and they're just identified by name they're called Smith's right because the header of the tablet says this at Wed kala kala Smith's was at our CI a contact time Tatyana contests having an allotment of metal and then you have a list of peddle and then you Elizabeth Smith scored or not a lot of middle so the scribe does it record all the information he knows about every individual Smith he just writes his name because that's sufficient to identify the Smith and that's all the scribe care about okay okay thus a man who is a priest may hold land but the scribe will only note that he is a priest if his office is the basis for his land holding claim and even then he may not record it so here we have a guy in soccer who is identified in this tablet as the priest who has a particular kind of plot that measures out that we would need 576 liters of grain to so that the same guy appears in another tablet were almost 99.9 percent certain that this is the same person the exact same person but he's not listed as a priest right so if we didn't have this tablet we wouldn't know he's a priest right but the scribe isn't interested in recording every single time every single thing you know it's about every single person it's also the case that not every one of the polity will have been monitored by the administration of the 50,000 individuals estimated to have lived in the pelion Kingdom only some 4100 are mentioned in the tablets some under 10% of which fewer than a thousand are identified by name second the palaces directly controlled only a segment of the total economy the economic role of the palaces has traditionally been considered central and dominant on the basis of the range and so that interests but recent work has shown that the activities under direct palatial control were limited to specific economic fields and tended to be geographically proximate to the palatial center the palaces instead had selected interests and activities that individually and collectively emphasize the symbolic importance of the centre and that perhaps cultivated the goodwill of local elites and the population at large it's nevertheless clear that even if we adhere to the view that the palaces were central to the Mycenaean economy this did not they did not encompass the entire economy nor were they the only institutions of significance there were there was therefore room for individuals to operate on the edges of and outside of palatial authority both economically and socially a third criticism is that the traditional model is based not on an analysis of individuals or practices but ultimately of words especially official titles and occupational terms that is to say it's lexically oriented perhaps as a result of the lexicographical bench of work on the Mycenaeans immediately post a Cyberman so immediately after to the site from it everyone was like oh look at all these Greek words we have right and they were trying to connect the dots between linear B words and words that we knew from later Greek texts this has two important consequences first an occupational group for example Smith's is treated not as a set of individuals who happen to do a specific type of work but as a homogeneous group thus variation within a group is suppressed even when there's evidence that suggests otherwise second there's a presumption that let lexical designators indicate social rules that totally determine an individual's status and identity thus if a man is late Smith then that is presumed to be his only social role excluding others and exhausting what can be said about it so the central problem sort of bringing this section to a close with reading Mycenaean Society straightforwardly from the texts is that it conflicts and confuses the administrative terminology of palatial administrators with reality the nature and the documents are such that scribes report only the information that's directly relevant to the composition of the document that they're rated as I mentioned above scribes don't record everything they know about each person or each group that they record the terms used by scribes also need not represent categories of identity that would have been embraced by the individuals affected it may have been useful prescribes the decks designated individuals as Smith's but it need not follow that the Smiths constituted a coherent group or identified themselves as such right just like when you fill out a form and you're asked to check off your ethnicity the categories that are listed don't have to be your categories that you identify that right they may seem weird and foreign to you so this tendency to approach society to words can create significant distortions of the evidence a good example this effect is the coinage of a modern term collector where no Mycenaean title exists so collectors are men who are not provided with an official title in the texts are identified only by their personal names they initially were called collectors by modern scholars because they're associated at pylos with the term Agora collection in the context of animal husband it's still not clear what this term collection means and what the collectors did so here's a tablet on CIT 655 which records flocks of sheep that are allocated to herders and specific places so there's a there's a specific formula first describe which the top of him where the sheep are being kept that in the nominative case if you don't know that means don't worry it's not important the herders name is indicated that in the name of the collector is indicated in the genitive case then you have the word collection sometimes not always and then you have the sex and the number of the sheep so this case makes a 70 male sheep that are being the other being kept by de bois so under the collection of huayna knows okay so strictly defined there are four collectors at pylos and 25 canal sauce at Canal sauce collectors also appear on tablets in the textile industry from shearing to the final delivery and finished cloth to the palace these texts don't exist at pylons so we don't know if the collectors also did this at pylos but what's interesting is that recent work has expanded the application of the term collect or to include other named individuals who are responsible for an important economic activities under palatial purview although the price precise status and function of the collectors are unclear the fact that their responsibilities are recorded alongside and in parallel to non collect or entries suggest if their activities were well integrated into the palatial economic system most scholars categorize the p lien collectors as palatial administrators and treat them like named officials so here they are collectors right this approach is grounded in the traditional bureaucratic model of collation Authority in which offices are delimited in terms of their powers positioned and a hierarchy of decision-makers and abstracted from their office holders like in a modern your office it's clear however that individuals could and did hold more than one office at a single time and so it follows that the conflation of the activities of individual office holders with the functions of the office itself cannot be taken for granted at paillasse the activities of the collectors are strikingly diverse presenting a bewildering array of potential functions so why would you lump them into a single category the answer is that as individuals they don't fit into the rigid framework of mycenaean official table there's no place for them in this chart so the creation of the office of collector becomes necessary to understand them so we take a step back we can see that this model has insuperable problems I'm claiming that it has insuperable problems individuals can hold multiple positions at once some of the most important actors lack official titles right these collectors are not called collectors when scribes they're just names it follows that the Mycenaean state can't be adequately comprehended as a static hierarchy of offices and consequently neither can the structure of Mycenaean society be derived from this rigid model so I've argued that conventional models of Mycenaean society are deficient on grounds of their reliance on administrative terms yields a rigid social structure of the state populated by social roles I also pointed out that this model has difficulties accounting for activities outside of direct relational control and for the internal heterogeneity of the political order my own solution to this problem is to focus on the activities of persons rather than impersonal institutions and offices this moves us away from completing society with administrative terminology and to allow us to examine the heterogeneity that we see in the texts it also increases the amount of information at our disposal as I mentioned above the number of officers the tablet is relatively small about 100 people but there are nearly 1,000 individuals identified by names by name in the paillasse corpus these named individuals represent only some 2% of the estimated total population of the state but something like 6.5 percent of the adult male population because most of these named individuals sadly are men about 95 percent of them and I think we can probably assume that their adult men they're not like two year old kids or which isn't a bad sample for the ancient world actually 6.5% that's okay actually that's great I should at this point that the evidence as it relates these individuals is selected in two key respects first these are not a random selection of Pelias but they are those who interact with the palatial administration directly in particular contexts essentially where it makes sense to write down their names also those who appear in the text who that have a long shelf life and this is requiring a little bit of explanation so linear B texts were recycled we have pretty good reasons to believe that they were recycling these were temporary administrative documents some were recycled basically on a monthly basis some are totally contingent right they're just one-off ad hoc texts and some appear to be held for yearly count so for example taxes are paid on a yearly basis so it makes sense to keep tax records around for a year right texts that go on a monthly basis you're going to scrap them after you don't need them anymore so the destruction tends to do a better job of preserving texts that are composed of an annual basis and then a less good job of texts that are composed on a monthly basis and a must much less good job of preserving texts that are contingent right there are just one offs so that's the first thing the second thing is because our documents are laconic administrative texts they only provide the evidence that was directly relevant to scribes so what we can deduce about these individuals is limited by the goals of the scribal administration so they're not interested for example in the names of the fathers of most men or the names of the sons of most men so we can we can derive like family trees kind of stuff how fortunately the evidence is relatively abundant the largest category of the Mycenaean lexicon consists of the personal names of men and women who are responsible for goods and services which fall under Felicia's purview so the most common words we have our names so we're talking about Smith's who are bronze allocated by Pallas hers who managed palatial flocks landowners super supervisors of work groups and so on and so forth these tablets are unpretentious documents that deal with the day-to-day operations of the palace this is kind of disappointing for historians who would prefer text illuminate political and social history and for this reason linear be documents are sometimes called laundry lists by people who think that they are boring but this specificity permits a detailed picture of the daily operations of the palatial administration and the role of individuals in these practices practically speaking the data set I'm using consists of all the personal names for the site of piles that's seven hundred and seven complete words definitely identified as personal names with an additional 231 fragmentary or uncertain names bringing the total to 938 in order to be relevant to the study of my scheme society however these names have to be associated with specific individuals through some kind of crystal graphical analysis traditionally linear be scholars have been skeptical of making Priscilla graphical identifications for two reasons first linear b tablets typically provide fairly little information about the individuals involved additional information like official titles are are rare and patronymic are very rare second most of the people identified by name were assumed to be low status laborers who should not be expected to recur another tablet so for example if we have a guy named Hector in this we don't he does exist at pileups but he's not here and we have a guy detector from this text can we make the leap that they're the same person or we just have two guys named Tector right like the way we could have two guys named Mike or George or something like that on the other hand the P lien documentation is unique in its scope and concentration with respect to time space and function linear B texts are highly laconic records relating to the internal operations of the palatial economy and temporary documents covering @pi loss probably five to seven month period I pile off all of the texts day to the year of the final destruction the palace with a couple of exceptions around 1200 BC they were also all found in the palace proper and indeed most were found a small two-room archives complex so what this slide is supposed to show you is that a huge percentage of all of the documents of Pylos are found in these two rooms that's what this big red dot is and the other smaller red dot show you locations of other tablets so it's something like 88% of all the documents are found in this very small concentrated area from a crisp a graphical perspective these conditions are very attractive although there are no universal criteria for what makes a plausible identification of individuals from names potential matches can be eliminated if the documents have questioned different chronology or if they revert to different cities or regions their problems these problems don't intrude upon the pelion data because all the individuals in the pelion corpus automatically satisfy these criteria all the dates all the text date to a single year and they relate to individuals oceans within a single relatively small holiday another important consideration is that although patronymics are very rare mice and even Mycenaean naming practices are such that there are lots and lots of names relative to the number of individuals even if you're super super skeptical about these course of graphical identification so at paillasse they're probably 788 individuals sharing 707 names so 1.11 individuals per name or if you take a very skeptical view 865 individuals sharing sharing seven hundred and seven games so one point to two individuals per name so we're not dealing with a situation like you know modern America where you could have lots of people in this room with the same name the most popular name at Pylos probably refers to is probably shared by four different individuals so we're not dealing with a situation where lots of people are named Michael or something like that um okay I don't have the time and you're not interested I hope in the nitty-gritty of mycenaean prosopography but that makes that makes up basically the bulk of my study in the series of chapters in my book I show that not only is it possible to make across geographical identifications with various levels of certainty so I have certain I've probable impossible unlikely but also that in most cases multiple access stations of the same name refer to a single individual although individual matches can be debated the cumulative weight of these identification is to ignore it's also worth noting that the number of these matches should be considered a minimum figure since the fragmentary nature of the data set inhibits our ability to argue for identification so if I have a really fragmentary text with two names in it can't really do anything with that right if the texts were fuller it might be able to realize connections that would allow me to make an identification so this can be illustrated by the fact that the rate of probable Pacific graphical matches increases substantially when dealing with the names of Smiths and herders so you can see here that four names in more than one series that is a sage so a series is a type of document right so names within web series with 190 of these and 72 percent of time I figure with certainty you or with probability I can say these are the same guys right but when I'm dealing with Smith's and herders I can say that they're certain or probable 93 percent of the time and that's because the texts that preserve Smiths and herders are very well preserved texts so I can see patterns in the text that it will allow me to make probable priscila graphical matches so the problem is a lack of positive evidence and not the presence of negative evidence if that makes sense so there's actually only one or two cases where I can prove that the same name is shared by two different people in all other cases I just don't have the evidence to prove that they definitely refer to one person so we can conclude a great deal from these data first named individuals were a heterogeneous group of course they differ in their activities but even within a given group such as herders there's considerable variation most Turner's occur only once others are listed against more one flock these plots may be located at the same place or at more than one place in the same region or their flocks may be disparate and far-flung still other earners are involved in other activities besides hurting now a man listed against one flock of sheep could be a full-time Shepherd like that's all he does right but he must have had extensive holdings of personal holdings of sheep or at least access to access to them since it was apparently the responsibility of the Shepherd to keep the palace's flock at full strike on the basis of the constant evidence Paul Halstead has suggested that the average Shepherd must have had considerable private flocks on average 160 sheep which is a lot for Greece to maintain palatial flocks at full strength so basically the palace would be a hundred sheep and say you owe us this much will every year and you need to keep these sheep alive and if a sheep dies accidentally or old age it was my responsibility to keep the block at full capacity so you know sheep are going to die that's a fact of life so that means that if I'm palatial murderer I need to have access to sheep either I need to have my own sheep or I need to get cheaper other people which means I'm not nobody right but when the same man is listed against two flocks at two different locations he cannot be personally hurting both of them right because you can't be in two places at the same time so we actually have really good evidence for men who are involved in activities that are both different economically and located in separate parts of space so a good example is a man named Alexis this is he's got red dots a wek says he's mister he's the augment or something like right who hurts palatial sheep in the northwest and Southwest sections poly - Southwest and who's also a Smith in the northwest right so he's also sniffing up here another example is Pluto's mr. wealthy right mr. wealth blue Thomson's Greek for wealth who's a Smith in the southwest 10th sheep in the northwest and tens goats in the Northeast over here these locations are approximate right it seems therefore that these men were not necessarily required to carry out all of these tasks personally but instead they were simply responsible for ensuring that they were carried out either by doing it themselves or by delegating it to dependents or kid this conclusion is new right most scholars have assumed that these men were humble fours in the field despite the fact that the texts say nothing to us about their social role the Smith's don't call them herders they just say they just list the name of the herder against the number of sheep or whatever some of the herders can probably identify as fairly important figures as it turns out including some individuals that have been identified by others as collectors in the broader sense of the term meaning important actors outside of the textile industry so named herders ranked widely and employed some were probably herders in the field or low-level hurting supervisors whereas others moved in elevated circles among the administrative elite this same pattern also applies to Spitz a group that has also been traditionally considered uniformly low status most Smith's appear only once of the texts as recipients of metal others as multiple recipients of metal at different locations and still others appear in other administrative capacities as herders as Lando as military officers and so on now there are reasons to believe that there's a correlation between how many times a person appears in the documentation and his or her standing in the palace the more times an individual appears in the tablets the more important and varied and spatially dispersed his or her responsibilities tend to be and as this chart shows most individuals only appear once in the tablets so tablets are yellow right most of the individuals only appear at one time and you have a pretty steep curve down these curves actually correspond fairly well to a Pareto distribution suggesting that there were inequalities and participation and palatial activities as we would expect it's also the case that those individuals who appear on the most tablets comprise some of the most important agents in the palatial administration so for example three of the four most commonly occurring names are those of collectors and the fourth is the most prominent of the followers a high-ranking military office so there are two general conclusions we can reach here first there aren't clear ranks and status among the named individuals but rather they fall along a continuum of importance from minor figures that appear only once to frequently attested individuals engaged in a wide range of activities second those individuals who appear in multiple texts are generally not specialists thus it's rare to find an individual who appears at many tablets of the same type instead these men and women tend to be involved in multiple types of activity within relational purview both of these conclusions are the opposite of the expectations of the traditional model in which individuals should be assigned administrative or professional roles with specific rights and specific responsibilities there are also reasons to believe that certain responsibilities were allocated to individuals with influence generally and not just those with influence and the palace I already mentioned that hers and palatial flocks must have had fairly large private bloc's indeed their flocks would have been enormous by classical Greek standards multitasking individuals must have been able to mobilize labour through kin or personal connections in order to maintain their multiple responsibilities Palace another example is the institution known as the Davos so in later Greek damos means people or village but in the Mycenaean period the damos is a corporate body distinct from the palace that administers an agricultural concerns essentially it's a kind of agricultural co-op now in one district of Pylos the Davos is comprised of or controlled by a group of men called the plot overs we know the names of twelve of these men and micro so prep my prosopography shows that three of them can be identified with certainty as smith's with a fourth identification classed as possible so some named individuals where stake holders and important regional institutions so there you know the head of the agricultural co-op which is you know not nothing so the evidence taken as a whole indicates that named individuals were not simply important agents in the palatial system they were also important in other institutions and in their local communities they had substantial holdings of their own although they often do not possess official titles we have good evidence for their importance to the palace namely direct attestations of their activities and responsibilities I'd argue therefore that most are perhaps even all the named individuals the tablets were part of one broad league group that interactive the palace numerically this is plausible there's about 800 individuals attested in the tablets and if we bump this up to a thousand you know I'm trying to account for fragmentary texts and texts that are lost and so on and so forth this still constitutes only 8% of the adult male population a figure that's well within the range of the size will lead groups in other ancient societies I would go a step further to argue that the individuals the tablets engaged voluntarily in palatial activities first they're good reasons to suspect that engagement and the palatial economy provided a benefit to them herder stood to profit materially and symbolically from their relationship to the palace because the palace wasn't interested in specific animals this left the herders agreed to swap animals freely between palatial and private flocks at councils there's evidence that herders swap their own yearlings into palatial flocks taking out collation use for their private clocks presumably to boost expansion of their own flocks right so you want women female women you want a female sheep in your flocks right because the more female sheep you have the more sheep you're going to have in the future at pylos Smiths were granted tax exemptions plots of land were also apparently allocated to craftsmen and compensation for their services and the palace allocated material tokens of status to individuals so individuals stood to make significant gains for participation in the palatial economic system but this need not have been their only or even their primary motivation if we see the palatial system as an arena of competition for influence and authority then individuals may have seen participation in palatial activities as a way or even the a way to maintain their standing in the community the palace also gained from this arrangement it seems clear that many economic fields monitored by the palace rely on resources outside of palatial purview in the text we don't see state-run agricultural estates we don't see large flocks under direct glacial control and we don't see metallurgical workshops instead these acts these activities are split up and parceled out perhaps even contracted out if we could speak of contracts to specific individuals rather than having extensive state-run undertakings the palace was apparently content to allocate jobs to individuals who are responsible for their completion these palatial systems presuppose the existence of nd make effective use of non palatial practices and resources that must have already been in place right because herders didn't pick up again keeping private flocks I've been responsive demands that they maintain palatial herds and full strength right it worked the other way around these palatial systems must have come into being in response to earlier conditions it's plausible that these palatial systems have very deep roots and reflect the traditional economic interests of early Mycenaean elites it's therefore seems of the palatial economy emerged at large part by successfully integrating the personal holdings of elites and local communities into palatial systems of production this integration was not absolute however and involves and Nik significant levels of cooperation between the palace and individuals and communities okay so in conclusion previous approaches argue that the mycenaean state virtually monopolized public affairs through a simple the powerful bureaucratic mechanism this understanding has framed the interpretation of Mycenaean society such that emphasis has been placed on institutional roles in their position in the administrative system the analysis of this of the crucifer graphical records suggests however that we need to abandon the strict law the strict model instead of modeling the palace of Pylos as a bureaucratic entity that determines social structure we can consider it an arena of interaction and competition populated by individuals and groups with various agendas and resources this way of thinking provides a number of event of advantages I think first it allows us to account for all of the textual evidence rather than focusing exclusively on offices it has information about some 800 individuals second it's more fluid and it can account for change over time in the traditional model change is difficult to explain because each social role is fixed by the central authority thus only the collapse of the palace can create the potential for change in my model changes is the product of shifting interactions between individuals groups and institutions third this approach integrates study of the palace with that society rather than seeing the palace as something distinct from society at large many scholars have seen the Mycenaean palaces being only superficially connected to its broader socio-economic context where they've seen it as a centralized hierarchical system in contrast to the anti system of Mycenaean society this is actually a term that was coined scholar while such proposals may explain the demise of the Mycenaean palacios is done essentially the palaces collapsed because they were too rigid they struggle to explain its emergence and its internal operation issues that the elite competition and integration model that's sort of my way of summarizing what I think in a couple of words on the dresses well in fact recent scholarship on the Greek city-states of the archaic period so basically 750 BC to 480 BC also explains many social and political developments via elite competition this is not to say that I think that the rules of the game were the same Mycenaean Greece in archaic Greece obviously they weren't but it does suggest that such models are useful in different historical contexts and before I list the fourth and last advantage of approach I also want to admit some limitations first despite the fact that this work opens up the study of the Mycenaean state and society quite a bit it's still quite limited in scope because about 90% of the population remains textually invisible we're still talking about elites almost all of whom are men because linear bezel scripts used for purely institutional purposes no quantity of new texts will change the situation I suspect the other feature of linear be the one that draws comparison to laundry lists is its bare-bones economic nature perhaps this is one reason why much of my discussion tends to focus on economic activities at socio-economic interest interest in scare groups the individuals in my study are described as competitive Mediterranean grande icers not unlike Homeric chieftains or the kabul a of pierre bourdieu if you've read or dude i don't have a very strong theory of the p lien individual which is not something that the textual evidence score anyway the category of the individual is problematic from any critics but as an analytical category is crucial to my work and for that matter is crucial to the work of the Mycenaean scribes in any case I'm not trying to make a universal claim about human nature that like men like to compete first status all the time in all places and times but rather a more limited claim about individual interactions in one particular field that is to say the palatial sphere in mycenaean pile walls that is a model in which individuals act as if they're aiming to maximize their social and economic standing there's a reasonably good job of explaining the patterns in the data the other thing I would say is that my model allows us to avoid the mistake which is common in Mycenaean studies of seeing the individual as somehow external state and society so traditional models of Mycenaean society have encouraged you that people either belong to the palace and they obediently work away for the good of the institution or their non palatial free agents working for their own self-interest this tendency to categorize individuals as rigid conformists or independent non conformists I think confuses more than it helps the only way to supersede these limitations is to turn to the archaeological evidence and this I suggest is the fourth point in favor of my approach my model Tali is much better with the archaeological evidence in large part because it allows for the messiness and variability of social life by refusing to reduce individuals and households to administrative ly fix roles so for example on the basis of the archaeological evidence Jim Reich's has suggested that the standardization and development of the Mycenaean drinking service was driven by demand for status well commodities by a broad and diverse elite group who are intimately involved in the operation palatial sphere this group of individuals can plausibly be correlated with the elite multitaskers named in the Pylos text and I could name lots of different examples of this type so Mycenaean archaeologists have a hard time distinguishing between different ranks of houses and tombs of a text to people it seems clear to me that if we're going to make significant progress in the study of Mycenaean society unnecessary development is the use of models that encourage archaeological and textual data to talk productively to each other thanks very much

Channel: Augustana College (IL)

Views: 49,074

Keywords: augustana college, rock island, illinois, Dimitri Nakassis, The Mycenaean World, Classics (Field Of Study), MacArthur Fellowship (Award Category)

Id: d9GhMr31Uc4

Length: 56min 37sec (3397 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2015