.THERE ARE NO GRAND NARRATIVES lurking in Linear B—no epic poems, no romances, no tales of gods and their derring-do. Arthur Evans knew as much from the start, as did every serious investigator after him. They were all aware, as Alice Kober reminded her Hunter College audience that June evening in 1946, that “we may only find out that Mr. X delivered a hundred cattle to Mr. Y on the tenth of June, 1400 B.C.” And that, of course, is precisely what they did find: records of crops harvested, goods produced, animals tended, and gifts offered up to the gods.
As a result, some observers have deemed the postdecipherment tablets dull and dispiriting. In The Man Who Deciphered Linear B, Andrew Robinson writes, “As for what the humanities—archaeologists, historians, literary scholars and others—have learnt from the decipherment since Ventris’s death, the answer is, honestly speaking, a little disappointing, set beside the artistic treasures of Troy, Mycenae and Knossos.”
But the tablets are unrivaled treasures for the light they shine on Mr. X and Mr. Y and their Bronze Age world—the world of Odysseus, Nestor, and Agamemnon. The great American newspaperman Murray Kempton, remarking sagely on the difference between criminal and civil proceedings, once wrote: “The Criminal Courts can only tell us the way some of our sisters and brothers steal or kill or die. But the Civil Courts tell us the way all of us live.” The same is true of the tablets—the civil documents of the first Greeks.
In the course of three millennia, the Linear B tablets passed from complete readability to complete obscurity and, against all odds, back to readability again. They reveal much about who the Mycenaeans were, from aristocrats through artisans and tradesmen and down to slaves. Though scholars continue to debate the precise interpretation of particular tablets, the Linear B archives as a whole disclose the day-to-day workings of a going civilization three thousand years distant, including, as the Mycenologist Cynthia W. Shelmerdine has written, “the movement of goods … , the status of land and animal holdings, the manufacture and repair of various kinds of equipment, and the personnel needed to carry out all the business of a Mycenaean state.”
The members of that state were flesh-and-blood men and women, as the tablets clearly show. Their account books, set in clay and baked in unintended fire, tell us what they sowed and reaped, what they ate and drank, the names of the gods they worshipped (with members of the Greek pantheon standing shoulder to shoulder with strange, pre-Greek deities), how they earned their keep, how they passed their time, how they defended themselves and made war. We even know their names, some of them names of exquisite nobility, others names one wouldn’t wish on a dog.
“ALMOST ALL PARTS of Greece became Mycenaeanized,” the scholar J. L. García Ramón has written; their combined population, spread over more than 150 communities, was about fifty thousand. The principal Mycenaean kingdoms were these:
There was Knossos, where invading Greeks took over the existing Minoan palace in about 1500 B.C. and held sway for a century or less, until in some unknown catastrophe the palace burned to the ground. There was Pylos, on the Greek mainland, home to the Palace of Nestor. The tablets there are younger than those of Knossos, and indeed, Mycenaean civilization managed to hang on there about two hundred years longer before it, too, was extinguished.
Another mainland kingdom was Mycenae itself, excavated by Schliemann in the 1870s. This was the kingdom that had propelled Evans on his quest for writing, for he was certain that so fine a civilization could scarcely have done without it. As it turned out, he was right. In 1952, about forty Linear B tablets were uncovered at Mycenae, not far from where Schliemann had dug. So here, too, as Evans had long suspected, an advanced, literate Bronze Age kingdom had flourished. Elsewhere on the mainland, the script has surfaced at Tiryns and at Thebes. Isolated finds continue to be made; as recently as 2010, a small piece of a Linear B tablet, preserved by a fire in an ancient refuse pit, with text pertaining to manufacturing of some kind, was discovered near the village of Iklaina, in southwest Greece.
The tablets show the twilight of the kingdoms. Normally, scribes pulverized their written records at the end of each year. The granules of unfired clay were mixed with water, and from this paste the next year’s tablets were formed, a practice that conserved both clay and storage space. Scholars have conjectured that before each crop of tablets was destroyed, the year’s records were transferred to a more permanent medium— permanent for its day, anyhow—like ink on parchment. But since any trace of these materials would have vanished long ago, whether the Mycenaeans actually did this can never be conclusively known.
So what we have, then (and all we will ever have), are the records of the final year of each palatial center before some cataclysm—invasion, earthquake, lightning strike—and the subsequent fire reduced the Mycenaean Age to ash.
THESE WERE THE PEOPLE of the kingdoms: “Mycenaean state bureaucracy,” Cynthia W. Shelmerdine writes, “was highly centralized, and authority rested in the hands of a hierarchy of officials.” At the head of each palace hierarchy stood the wanax, the early Greek word for “king” or “ruler,” written, according to Linear B spelling rules, as wa-na-ka. (The word’s descendant, anax, meaning “lord” or “master,” turns up five hundred years later in Homeric Greek.) The wanax was the administrative leader of each Mycenaean kingdom, overseeing domestic economics and foreign trade, military preparedness, ritual observance, law, and, in an inevitability that seems a hallmark of every human civilization, taxation. “His status,” Shelmerdine explains, “is reflected in his superior land holdings.” From one Pylos tablet, for instance, we know that “his temenos, or plot of land, is three times as big as those of other officials listed there.”
The picture of the wanax that emerges most clearly is that of an economic head of state. As Shelmerdine points out, Linear B records take pains to identify certain craftsmen—“a potter, a fuller and an armourer at Pylos, a textile worker at Thebes, and purple dye workers at Knossos”—by the designation wanakteros (spelled wa-na-ka-te-ro), an adjective meaning “royal.” These were, in other words, the handpicked craftsmen to the king; their skill had elevated them to positions like those of the present-day British firms that by royal warrant may call themselves “Stationer/Robe Maker/Wheelwright… to the Queen.”
Just below the wanax was the lawagetas (spelled ra-wa-ke-ta), or feudal landowner. The lawagetas—there was one each at Knossos and Pylos—seemed to be in charge of certain groups of subordinates, who helped with the day-to-day running of the kingdom. These subordinates included some military personnel, like rowers, as well as smallholders, who appear to have presented the lawagetas with a share of their agricultural yield in exchange for being granted land to work.
Below the lawagetas were still other officials, including hekwetai (e-qe-ta; literally “followers”), high-level representatives of each palace who appear to have had military responsibilities; “collectors,” who seem to have been comptrollers, responsible for palace commodities including livestock; and the scribes themselves, whose literacy skills were essential for palace record-keeping. At the regional level, officials included damokoros, or provincial governors; at the local level they included mayors and vice mayors; landowners known as telestai (te-re-ta); and “fig-overseers.”
MYCENAEANS PLIED a range of trades. Many tablets reveal the names of occupations—they appear, for instance, on lists of men assigned to military details; on inventories of raw materials issued to metalsmiths; and on accountings of rations dispensed to indentured servants and their dependent children—and from these lists it is possible to tell quite a lot about who did what in the Mycenaean world.
Most workers listed on the tablets were men, but from those on which lists of women’s names appear, it is clear that certain occupations, like textile work, were traditionally reserved for them. Women spun sheep’s fleece into woolen yarn and flax into linen and wove it into cloth on looms; men took the cloth, fulled it (a process, analogous to felting, that strengthens and stabilizes the fabric), and dyed it. The tablets also mention tanners, and leatherworkers of both sexes: Men fashioned the leather into harnesses, while women stitched it into shoes and bags. There were also men and women in religious life, the priests and priestesses.
Men were involved in the making of war (soldiers, rowers, and archers) and in the manufacture and upkeep of the instruments of war (swordmakers and bowmakers, chariotmakers and chariot-wheel repairmen). They worked as goldsmiths and perfumers, a major enterprise in the Mycenaean world. There were woodcutters, carpenters, shipbuilders, and netmakers; fire kindlers and bath attendants; heralds, hunters, herdsmen, and beekeepers.
There were also slaves. One tablet, from Knossos, records the acquisition of a slave. Others, from various sites, list rations of grain (wheat or barley), figs, and bedding disbursed to female slaves and their children. As Shelmerdine writes, “The tablets reinforce the view” that Mycenaean society comprised “two kinds of people: the social/political/economic elite, and those who do their work and supply their particular needs. The texts thus present an array of different craftsmen and herdsmen, who must have occupied the middle levels of society, as well as fully dependent workers housed and fed by the palace.” Some of these dependent workers, both men and women, are described on the tablets as doelos (do-e-ro) and doela (do-e-ra), respectively; both terms are akin to the Classical Greek word doulos, “slave.”
At the palaces, resident groups of women were assigned to perform specific tasks, including weaving: Cloth was a valuable commodity in overseas trade. “Slave status is suggested for these women because they are fully supported with rations by the palace, appear in groups rather than as individuals, and are not named,” Shelmerdine writes. Many of them were foreigners, imported to work in the Mycenaean palaces, as the tablets make clear: At Pylos, one such group is described as “captives”; others, Shelmerdine says, “are identified by [non-Greek] ethnic adjectives: Milesians, Knidians, Lemnians, Lydians and so on.” Outside the palaces, certain craftsmen, like bronzesmiths, appeared to have had male slaves assigned to aid their labors.
Because many Linear B tablets contain personal names, we know quite a bit about early Greek naming practices. Some men’s names are descriptive, and evocatively so, with English equivalents like “Gladly Welcome,” “Head of the Community,” “Born on the Third Day of the Month,” “Snub-Nosed,” and, less flatteringly, “Coward.” Other names are followed by descriptive epithets, often heroic in nature: “… Who Commands the People,” “… Who Remembers His Work,” “… Who Overcomes Men,” “… Who Kills in Battle,” “… Who Watch Fire.”
Still other people had names that while “highly expressive,” as J. L. García Ramón writes, were “anything but heroic.” Among them are “Goat-Head,” “Mouse-Head,” “Having the Bottom Bare,” and “Devourer of Excrements.” Such names, perhaps unsurprisingly, appear to have been bestowed upon foreigners and slaves.
THE TABLETS ARE economic documents above all, and in the premonetary society of Mycenae, economics was rooted in the amassing, enumeration, and exchange of goods: livestock, agricultural produce, and man-made wares. Many tablets did indeed, as Kober suggested, keep track of cattle. Others are quite literally devoted to counting sheep, and there were an awful lot of sheep to count: A group of eight hundred tablets from Knossos alone inventories nearly a hundred thousand of them. Mycenaean scribes also kept tabs on pigs, cattle, goats, oxen, and other animals, both in flocks and as the stuff of state banquets. Charmingly, the tablets sometimes record the names of individual oxen—names with English equivalents like “Changeful of Hue,” “Noisily Prattling,” “Dapple,” “Winey,” and “Blondie.” Still other tablets count the kingdom’s horses: the now-famous tablet with the Linear B word “po-lo” (pōlos) was one of them.
Agriculture was as important as livestock to the Mycenaean economy. Besides wheat, barley, and figs, important agricultural products included olives, olive oil, and pistachio nuts; wine, cheese, and honey; spices like saffron and coriander; and flax. Many commodities were considered so vital that special offices in the palaces existed just to keep track of them: At Knossos, an office in the east wing of the Palace of Minos housed records having to do with honey and aromatics; another, in the west wing, handled records pertaining to sheep.
The production of wheat was an especially vast enterprise, as the tablets attest. On Crete, as John Chadwick writes in The Mycenaean World:
The most extraordinary figure for wheat is for the area called Dawos, which we have good reason to think was in the fertile plain of the Messará in the south of the island. Here the tablet is broken so that the numeral is incomplete, but it unquestionably began with 10,000 units. Even assuming that no further figures followed, this would amount to some 775 tons. …
On the mainland, he writes:
The absence of any record of the grain harvest at Pylos is doubtless due to the time of the year at which the destruction of the archives occurred. … But we can infer something about the scale of production from the rations issues to the slave-women. … A broken tablet … is probably a total of the rations issued each month to these women; it gives a figure of 192.7 units of wheat, or around 14 tons. This implies the need for an annual production of about 170 tons for this purpose alone.
Though the Mycenaeans had no money as we know it, they most assuredly paid taxes, and many Linear B tablets turn out to be tax records. The central palaces exacted payment from their constituent districts in the form of raw materials and other articles of value, including oil, olives, grain, honey, spices, horn, wood, animal hides, and cyperus, an aromatic grass. The tablets also show that members of certain professions, including bronzesmiths, had tax-exempt status: They were relieved of the obligation to make payments in kind, though it can be assumed that their contributions were taken out in the form of labor.
THE MAKING OF useful and beautiful things—from chariots, wheels, and weapons to furniture, vessels, textiles, and perfume—was a thriving enterprise in the Mycenaean world, and the results are copiously recorded in its archives.
Four metals are mentioned on the tablets. Foremost was bronze, “used for a variety of purposes and no doubt… the most important metal for everyday life in the upper classes,” as the scholars Alberto Bernabé and Eugenio R. Luján write. It was used, among other things, to make vessels, braziers, certain chariot components, and weaponry, including the heads of spears and javelins. (Such spearheads, the two scholars point out, are mentioned in Homer, as in these lines from book 4 of the Iliad: “He held a spear of eleven cubits; / at the front, the bronze spear-point blazed.”) Gold was used to decorate furniture, silver to decorate chariot wheels. Lead was also used: Recall the lead-lined cist full of tablets discovered in Emperor Nero’s day.
From wood, furniture was made, and it is inventoried extensively in the Linear B records. Wooden furniture included stools, chairs, beds, and the nine-legged tables, characteristic of Mycenaean carpentry, that were often inlaid with ivory (the Mycenaean word for which was elephas, spelled e-re-pa), gold, lapis, or other precious materials. Chairs, recorded as being made of ebony, could also be lavishly ornamented. They often had matching footstools, itemized on the tablets with the logogram .
Chariots and their wheels were also made of wood. Drawn by two horses, a Mycenaean chariot could accommodate two men, the driver and a warrior. Their building and upkeep were so essential to the well-being of the kingdoms that the Linear B archives contain detailed chariot construction and maintenance records. (Alice Kober’s seminal paper of 1945, “Evidence of Inflection in the ‘Chariot’ Tablets from Knossos,” concerned a set of these tablets.) From such tablets, Bernabé and Luján write:
We are well informed about the chariot’s constituent elements. … The frame of the case was made of wood and covered by leather at the front and at the sides. The chariot floor … most probably consisted of flexible leather straps. In order to make access easier the chariots were provided with footboards. … Wheels turned on an axle. On [one Pylos tablet] thirty-two bronze axles … are recorded. …
Another tablet from Pylos, they write, “is a delivery record concerning the fabrication of chariots and wheels,” and makes note of wooden axles. It reads, “Thus the wood-cutters give to the wheeler’s workshop 50 new branches and 50 axles.”
The production of woven textiles, a major industry, is also well documented. Woolens are sometimes described as being white or gray, natural colors for undyed fleece. But the tablets show that the Mycenaeans also produced colored textiles, dyed in hues of purple and red, with dyes made from natural ingredients like minerals and plants. They also describe the production of various kinds of cloth. One type, pharweha (pa-we-a), has a Homeric counterpart in pharos: In the Odyssey, the word denotes the cloth the faithful Penelope weaves—and rips out nightly to thwart a stream of gentleman callers—while she waits for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan War.
Potters and metalsmiths made storage containers of all sorts, and the archives list not only the vessels themselves but also what was kept in them. “Remarkable at Pylos is the amount of ground floor space given over to storage,” Cynthia Shelmer-dine writes. “Hundreds of drinking and eating vessels stood on shelves in the pantries; storerooms housed olive oil, some of it perfumed, as tablets found with the storage jars make clear. More oil tablets fell from above when the building burnt down ca 1200 BC, so another such storeroom must have stood on the upper storey. Other objects that fell from above include jewellery, ivory inlays from furniture, and tablets dealing with linen textiles. These finds suggest that the upstairs too was a mix of private quarters, storage and business areas.”
On Crete and in mainland Greece, archaeologists have unearthed Mycenaean “stirrup-jars” (traditional clay vases with handles and spouts, used to hold oil and wine); the jars were often painted with Linear B words. The texts they bear are utilitarian—they tend to document the production, transport, and delivery of the jar’s contents—functioning much as inventory, shipping, and tracking labels on modern packages do.
The Mycenaeans were master perfumers. “The production of perfumes,” Bernabé and Luján write, “was one of the most important industrial activities in Mycenaean times,” and many storage vessels contained perfumed oil. The steps involved in making perfume, or “ointment,” as the tablets often called it, are well documented: First, the ointment-maker infused wine with spices like cumin, coriander, fennel, sesame, or sage—or with herbs and flowers like rush, rose, and perhaps iris—to extract their fragrance. Other ingredients, like fruit, honey, and possibly lanolin, might be included.
Next, he added a thickener like natural gum or resin to a quantity of olive oil. The wine and herbs were mixed with the oil and the mixture was concentrated by boiling. Finally, a coloring agent like henna might be added to the finished perfume. These fragrant products appear to have been used for personal adornment as well as in religious ritual, offered frequently as gifts to the gods. (Mycenaean cloth and perfumed oil were also traded overseas for precious metals like gold and silver.)
THE TABLETS ALSO document the threat of war. Though there was no Talos, the bronze giant said to have policed the Cretan coast, it is clear from the tablets that all the kingdoms took great pains to protect against attack. This imperative appears to have arrived with the Greeks. As John Chadwick writes in The Mycenaean World: “Minoan society in Crete seems to have been relatively peaceful; military scenes are not common in art. … No Minoan town seems to have been fortified. But with the coming of the Greeks to Crete in the … fifteenth century, a change comes over the pacific face of society. … Greek rule in Crete is distinguished by this warlike aspect.”
Many Linear B records deal with military preparedness: Some tablets itemize the horses, chariots, weapons, and other equipment issued to soldiers. This included suits of armor, comprising a helmet with earflaps (identified by the logogram 
) and a leather corselet with shoulder pieces (
), along with arrows, spears, and swords, some inlaid with silver or gold.
Other tablets list the names of men, including archers and rowers, assigned to military duty on land or sea. A tablet from Pylos records men’s names under the heading, “Thus the watchers are guarding the coastal regions.” Another lists eight hundred rowers assigned to patrol various points along the shoreline. Similar conscription records are found at Knossos.
RELIGION CAN BE found between the lines. Much has been gleaned obliquely from certain inventories on the tablets, including lists of gifts to the gods and supplies for religious feasts. “The Linear B documents concern the economic administration of the palace in its various aspects,” the scholar Stefan Hiller writes. “Therefore, there are no religious texts in the strict sense of the word—no prayers, hymn, manuals of religious instruction. All that we can use are the records of economic transactions. … In addition the records that list palace personnel or provide for their subsistence sometimes mention titles of religious dignitaries.”
The tablets capture a theology in transition. On the one hand, Hiller writes, they offer “striking proof of a high degree of continuity between Mycenaean and Classical Greek religion”: Gods’ names listed there include some of the most renowned figures in the Olympian pantheon, like Dionysus (long thought by scholars not to have appeared till the first millennium B.C.), Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, and Artemis.
But these names appear side by side with more curious ones, many of them pre-Greek, long forgotten by Classical times. Among them are various female names—most likely those of local deities—beginning with the word potnia, “mistress”: Mistress of Wild Beasts, Mistress of Horses, Mistress of Grain, Mistress of Asia, Mistress of the Labyrinth. The tablets also mention a few goddesses who were early female counterparts of male Olympians. They include Posidaeia, the opposite number of Poseidon, and Diwjā, that of Zeus. They, too, were gone by the Classical Age.
Some tablets contain lists of gifts offered to the gods. One, from Knossos, records twenty-two linen cloths presented to the Mistress of the Labyrinth. Others note gifts of manufactured items like gold vessels and perfume, as well as agricultural products like oil, olives, barley, spelt, figs, spices, wool, honey, and wine. Quantities of livestock, including sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs, were also sacrificed in the gods’ honor: As recorded on one tablet from Pylos, Hiller writes, “3 bulls are sent by military contingents (troops) to the di-wi-je-we e-re-u-te-re, presumably the ‘priest of Zeus.’ ”
Mycenaean state banquets served theological as well as political ends. “We know that from Homer onwards these banquets included a religious section, when the animals were slaughtered,” Hiller writes. “That in Pylos state banquets were performed was concluded from archaeological evidence even before it was understood that several important tablets concerned this topic.”
One tablet from Pylos documents the supplies required for such a banquet, possibly the initiation ceremony for the wanax. These include, Chadwick writes, “1,574 litres of barley, 14½ litres of cyperus, 115 litres of flour, 307 litres of olives, 19 litres of honey, 96 litres of figs, 1 ox, 26 rams, 6 ewes, 2 he-goats, 2 she-goats, 1 fattened pig, 6 sows [and] 585½ litres of wine,” adding: “The barley alone would provide rations for 43 people for a month.” That the entertainment at these banquets included music is known both from a mural in the Pylos palace depicting lyre players and from a tablet from Thebes, recording rations dispensed to various personnel, including two l¯rastāe (ru-ra-ta-e), “lyre players.”
Such meticulous accounts of banqueting supplies may have had a very particular function in Mycenaean religious life. “The book-keeping testifies to the practice of piety toward the gods,” Stefan Hiller writes. He continues:
There are strong reasons to believe that the primary motivation for the scrupulous monitoring of all major and minor expenditure for offerings and other religious activities was not only economic interest; it was much more the awareness that the communal welfare depended on the fulfillment of religious duties. Consequently it was the palace’s most important obligation to secure the gods’ benevolence through a firm control of all religious prescriptions. … The main purpose of writing offering lists may have been to make sure that all religious duties had been observed.
BUT FOR ALL THIS, the communal welfare of the Mycenaean state did not last forever. On Crete, catastrophe claimed the Palace of Knossos sometime between 1450 and 1400 B.C. On the mainland, Pylos, at least, held on until about 1200, when it, too, was destroyed. “What actually happened remains a tantalizing mystery,” John Chadwick has written. “All we know is that the palace was looted and burnt. The absence of human remains suggests that no resistance took place there; … the archaeological picture suggests that the population was reduced to something like a tenth of its earlier numbers.”
So ended the first flush of Greek civilization, and from then till the coming of the Greek alphabet centuries later, the art of writing was at best a dimly remembered dream. Before long the Mycenaean archives—describing a world of monarchs and slaves, gods and goddesses, spinners and weavers, men who made art and men who made war—had passed from readability into darkness, where they would languish for three thousand years.
That we have been able to admit this world to the annals of history owes to a long confluence of natural forces and forceful natures. Had the ancient palaces not burned to the ground; had Schliemann not dug at Mycenae; had Arthur Evans not been so very determined (and so very nearsighted); had Alice Kober not painstakingly scissored 180,000 index cards from odd scraps of paper; had Michael Ventris not been such a woeful boy, in deep need of intellectual distraction, we would know nothing of the written records of these early Greeks—the Bronze Age heroes of whom Homer would sing—unearthed, unlocked, and readable once more.