This book revises our understanding of Mycenaean society through a detailed prosopographical analysis of individuals attested in the administrative texts from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos in southwestern Greece, ca. 1200 BC.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Although the Mycenaean civilization of the Greek Bronze Age was identified 150 years ago, its origins remain obscure. Jack L. Davis, codirector of excavations at the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, takes readers on a tour of the beginnings of Mycenaean civilization through a case study of this important site. In collaboration with codirector Sharon R. Stocker, Davis demonstrates that this ancient place was a major node for the exchange of ideas between the already established Minoan civilization, centered on the island of Crete, and the residents of the Greek mainland. Davis and Stocker show how adoption of Minoan culture created an ideology of power focused on a single individual, celebrating his military prowess, investing him with divine authority, and creating a figure instantly recognizable to readers of Homer and students of Greek history. A Greek State in Formation makes the powerful case that a knowledge of the Greek Bronze Age is indispensable to the classics curriculum.

Women in Mycenaean Greece is the first book-length study of women in the Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Greece and the only to collect and compile all the references to women in the documents of the two best attested sites of Late Bronze Age Greece - Pylos on the Greek mainland and Knossos on the island of Crete. The book offers a systematic analysis of women’s tasks, holdings, and social and economic status in the Linear B tablets dating from the 14th and 13th centuries BCE, identifying how Mycenaean women functioned in the economic institutions where they were best attested - production, property control, land tenure, and cult. Analysing all references to women in the Mycenaean documents, the book focuses on the ways in which the economic institutions of these Bronze Age palace states were gendered and effectively extends the framework for the study of women in Greek antiquity back more than 400 years. Throughout, the book seeks to establish whether gender practices were uniform in the Mycenaean states or differed from site to site and to gauge the relationship of the roles and status of Mycenaean women to their Archaic and Classical counterparts to test if the often-proposed theories of a more egalitarian Bronze Age accurately reflect the textual evidence. The Linear B tablets offer a unique, if under-utilized, point of entry into women’s history in ancient Greece, documenting nearly 2000 women performing over fifty task assignments. From their decipherment in 1952 one major gap in the scholarly record remained: a full accounting of the women who inhabited the palace states and their tasks, ranks, and economic contributions. Women in Mycenaean Greece fills that gap recovering how class, rank, and other social markers created status hierarchies among women, how women as a group functioned relative to men, and where different localities conformed or diverged in their gender practices.

The large-scale, formal consumption of huge quantities of food and drink is a feature of many societies, but extracting evidence for feasting from the archaeological record has, until recently, been problematic. This collection of essays investigates the rich evidence for the character of the Mycenaean feast.

In 1952 Michael Ventris deciphered the script found on the Linear B tablets from Crete and the Greek mainland, therefore revealing the earliest known form of Greek. In 1956 he and John Chadwick published Documents in Mycenaean Greek, which gave an account of the decipherment, of the language of the tablets, of the society and economy revealed by the documents and a series of chapters giving texts, translations and commentary of the most important tablets. Though partially updated in 1973, Documents is now very much outdated: there has been a vast accrual of bibliography on the subject since 1973, and discoveries of tablets at new sites. This new survey, written by fourteen of the world's leading experts, will bring the reader fully up-to-date with developments in all aspects of Mycenaean studies, concluding with a new, full glossary of all the most recently discovered words.

This volume reconsiders literacy and communication in pre-modern societies, focusing especially on how material form affects the way textual artefacts are understood and interpreted. By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines such as archaeology, medieval studies, and Islamic studies, this volume provides the specialist and non-specialist with insights on how humans express themselves through writing and material culture.

A dazzlingly ambitious history of the ancient world that places women at the center—from Cleopatra to Boudica, Sappho to Fulvia, and countless other artists, writers, leaders, and creators of history Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women—whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power—were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it. In this monumental work, Dunn reconceives our understanding of the ancient world by emphasizing women's roles within it. The Missing Thread never relegates women to the sidelines and is populated with well-known names such as Cleopatra and Agrippina, as well as the likes of Achaemenid consort Atossa and Olympias, a force in Macedon. Spanning three thousand years, the story moves from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, from Lesbos to Asia Minor, from the Persian Empire to the royal court of Macedonia, and concludes with Rome and its growing empire. The women of antiquity are undeniably woven throughout the fabric of history, and in The Missing Thread they finally take center stage.