John Chadwick

The Mycenaean World

List of illustrations Preface 1. The hellenization of Greece 2. The documentary evidence 3. Mycenaean geography 4. The people of the tablets 5. The social structure and the administrative system 6. Religion 7. Agriculture 8. Craft, industry and trade 9. Weapons and war 10. Homer the pseudo-historian 11. The end of the Mycenaean world Bibliography Index.

Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives

With the fuller publication of the material found by Blegen at Ano Englianos in 1939 ( The Pylos Tablets , Dr. Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., Princeton, 1951) and by Evans at Knossos in 1899–1904 ( Scripta Minoa , Vol. II, ed. Sir John Myres, Oxford, 1952), it has at last been possible to undertake a systematic study of the Minoan–Mycenaean texts written in Linear Script B . Their decipherment is now the central problem in Aegean archaeology, accentuated by the discovery, in the summer of 1952, of many new tablets by Blegen at Pylos and by Wace at Mycenae. Evans believed that Linear B (first found in the L.M. II palace of Knossos, c. 1400 B.C., and thereafter the exclusive script of the Mainland down to the ‘Dorian invasion’) was an administrative revision of Linear A , designed to express the same ‘Aegean’ language; and that Minoan colonisation of the Mainland was responsible for its occurrence at Pylos, Tiryns, Thebes, and Eleusis.

Minoan Linear A: A Provisional Balance Sheet

The decipherment in 1952 by Michael Ventris of the prehistoric script known as Minoan Linear B at once suggested that here lay the key to the earlier Cretan script called Linear A. Linear B was proved to be a syllabic script which represented, imperfectly but just adequately, the Greek language in a form more archaic than any other surviving records. At an early stage in our short-lived partnership I discussed with Ventris the possibility of applying the results to the older script, and we both made certain experiments; but we concluded that the situation did not allow any easy progress, and being deeply committed to the development of his Linear B theory, we decided to leave this field to others, at any rate for the time being. Since then a great deal of work on Linear A has been published by other scholars, almost all of it based upon the decipherment of Linear B, and equally inspired by the success which attended the solution of the major problem. It is not, perhaps, too soon to review some of these attempts and appraise the progress made so far. We are clearly far from an agreed solution; but there are encouraging signs that the true solution is not too far beyond our grasp, though I for one doubt whether it can be achieved by mere ingenuity. I should like to emphasize at the outset that I am completely neutral in the controversies which are raging, and this account is intended to be quite impartial.

The Geography of the Further Province of Pylos

The conclusions reached by Miss C. Shelmerdine invite a reconsideration of the geography of the Pylian kingdom. I have dealt extensively with the Hither Province in the chapter I have contributed to Minnesota Messenia Expedition: Reconstructing the Bronze Age Environment, edited by W. A. McDonald, and G. R. Rapp (Minneapolis 1972). In this I proposed a scheme by which the standard order of the Nine Towns runs approximately from N to s, but begins inland in the Kyparissia River Valley and ends just E of Cape Akritas at Rhion, classical Asine and modern Koroni. I have no wish to alter any of the suggestions put forward there; but at that time I was unable to find any satisfactory method of transferring the continuation of the standard list on Jn 829 to the map of the Further Province. If we accept, as I do, that Miss Shelmerdines grouping of the towns of the Further Province is valid, then it would be incredible if these groups did not correspond to geographical contiguity. However convenient in terms of administration, it would be absurd to lump together in a group or subgroup towns a long distance apart. Thus we can take as a starting point the division of the towns into two main groups and four subgroups: a i Ra-wa-ra-ta2 b I A-[.]-ta2 (= A-si-ja-ti-ja) Sa-ma-ra

Prehistoric Crete: A Warning

The trouble with epigraphy is that it does not admit of tidy classification. The linguist seizes upon inscriptions as samples of language; the historian, when the linguist has interpreted them, as factual evidence. But their discovery is due to the archaeologist; and in a prehistoric period, where the historian has no loctis stanai , the archaeologist is liable to claim epigraphy as part of his province. This is what seems to have happened in the case of a recent book, Prehistoric Crete , which contains in Chapter 3 a long account of the Minoan scripts and the controversy which surrounded the decipherment of Linear B. It is regrettable that Mr. Hutchinsons expert knowledge of Minoan archaeology is not matched by a similar grasp of Minoan and Mycenaean epigraphy, and I feel driven to write a criticism of this chapter, in the hope that it will be thoroughly revised and brought up to date in a second edition.

The Decipherment of Linear B

Illustrations Preface 1. Michael Ventris 2. The Minoan scripts 3. Hopes and failures 4. Birth of a theory 5. Growth and development 6. The decipherment and the critics 7. Life in Mycenaean Greece 8. Prospects Postscript Appendix Index.