The Riddle of the Labyrinth (47 page)

What is beyond doubt is this: Without Kober's work, Linear B would never have been unraveled as soon as it was, if ever. Her deep intellect, her single-minded resolve, and her ferocious rationalism made it possible to recapture the vanished key to the script, the earliest Greek writing of all.

T
HERE 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
:

On the mainland, he writes: