Women in Mycenaean Greece

The Linear B Tablets from Pylos and Knossos

Barbara A. Olsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317747949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

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.

1 The women of Mycenaean Greece

Introduction

“Cherchez la femme.” “Find the woman.” This command, to search out an unknown or invisible woman at the heart of a mystery, has particular relevance for the study of women in Greek antiquity – where so often women have been shrouded in myth, notoriety or obscurity. To talk about the actual, rather than mythological, women of Greek antiquity is a complicated task – in order to locate the real women of Ancient Greece one must sift carefully through the historical, epigraphic, and archaeological records, all of which are dominated by the deeds and activities of Greek men. Greek women are consistently – across eras and regions – recorded far less frequently than their male counterparts, both as a consequence of women’s near complete exclusion from the political and military arenas and the tendency to locate women in the domestic world, where often their social and economic identities become subsumed under those of their male relatives.

This question of rendering women visible – of recovering them from the documentary and archaeological records – is a task historians of women and gender in the ancient world have been undertaking for four decades now. Women’s graves have been excavated, and their names, responsibilities, and rituals have been carefully sifted from inscriptions, orations and the texts of the historiographers. Yet, perhaps nowhere does visibility for women need to be recovered more than in the Greek Bronze Age, whose women have not previously been the focus of a full-length study. Finley unlocked the Homeric world of Odysseus, but what might the Mycenaean world of a real-life Penelope look like?¹

This book is a study of the women of Mycenaean Greece as they appear in the administrative documents of Late Bronze Age Greece: the Linear B tablets of the 14th and 13th centuries BCE. This is the first study to compile all the references to women in the Linear B tablets from Pylos on the Greek mainland and Knossos on Crete – by far the two best-documented Mycenaean sites – and the first to offer a systematic analysis of the ways in which the economic institutions of these Bronze Age palace states were gendered. This study has three main objectives: 1. to locate the women scattered throughout the records; 2. to identify the mechanisms and rationales that drove the visibility of the women recorded in the documents; and 3. to assess the ways in which Mycenaean women functioned in the economic institutions where they were best attested – production, property holdings, land tenure, and cult practice – in order to determine whether gender practices were uniform in the Mycenaean states or differed from site to site. The study also raises a broader question: what was the relationship of the roles and status of Mycenaean women to their later Archaic and Classical counterparts, and do the often-proposed theories of a more egalitarian Bronze Age hold up to the evidence?

From the tablets of Pylos and Knossos, more than 2000 women emerge – rendering the Linear B tablets one of the largest sets of evidence for women in any period of Greek antiquity. Women surface either as individuals identified by their names and/or titles or as members of aggregate groups.² I suggest that these Bronze Age women attested in the tablets do not enter the documentary record randomly, but rather that both sites demonstrate a clear (if idiosyncratic) logic as to which women come to warrant palace attention and hence textual visibility. Overall, I contend that key differences occur between the treatment of women in the Mycenaean and historical periods; while the later evidence primarily places women in the contexts of the oikos (family), most of the Linear B evidence registers women who are outside it. And finally, I argue that the two Mycenaean palace states, while not egalitarian in their approach to gender, nonetheless differ not only from the later periods but also from each other. Knossos and Pylos do not share a unified, homogeneous set of gender practices but differ in several important ways in their incorporations of women in their states’ economies. I conclude that as early as these earliest of Greek written records, gender already appears a variable institution in Ancient Greece, site-specific and driven by the idiosyncratic needs and histories of each state rather than as a monolithic, unchanging institution for the women of the Mycenaean world.

Gender and Aegean Prehistory

The concept of gender has meaning only as the product of specific historical circumstances. Gender, defined here as the differentiation of society based on perceived sexual difference, conveys different expectations for the roles of men and women in different cultures and functions as a primary, if not the primary, category of social organization in every known human society.³ Within a given society, gender establishes a framework for the activities of men and women, governs the mechanisms for the distribution of tasks and goods, sets the political, economic, and institutional roles assigned or denied to men and women, and provides a rationale for the social and economic separation of the sexes.⁴ As such, gender functions as a primary, defining trait of cultural identity – one as central as language and religion.

This awareness of the importance of gender as a social variable has been informing Classical scholarship since the early 1970s. Feminist historians, both inside and outside the field of Classics, have insisted on the historical specificity of gender throughout the different periods and poleis of Greek antiquity, recognizing that the specific meanings of gender, as with other hierarchical categories, vary across space and time throughout the Greek world.⁵ In the historical period, social mores governing gender ideologies and practices differed widely, based on the particular histories of individual city-states. Certainly, no contemporary Classical scholar would declare that a universalized concept of gender was in place throughout the Classical period – even the most cursory of glances at the differences in women’s status and lives in fifth-century Sparta and fifth-century Athens would quickly dispel this notion; the differences in the gender practices of Athens and Sparta are substantial and are each rooted in the different historical and institutional circumstances of each polis. Both poleis evolved the gender systems specific to their own particular societal needs: the high levels of mobility, autonomy, and economic power enjoyed by Spartan women developed to fill needs opened in Spartan society by the vacuum left by the military-centered lives of Spartan men⁶ while the nascent democracy at Athens limited all of these to foster a sense of solidarity among citizen men and to protect newly restricted Athenian citizenship requirements – and so barred women from ownership of property and exercise of legal rights including the franchise and the ability to self-represent in court, while social mores strongly discouraged even the circulation of citizen women in public spaces.⁷ Consequently, we observe each state developing those specific systems of gender practice which fit its own specific needs and societal ideals.

But how far back do the roots of such widely different gender practices in the Greek world extend? Are these variances in Greek gender practices to be attributed to pressures related to the eighth-century rise of the polis which then fractured an otherwise monolithic system of gender throughout Greece or was gender already a fragmented and site-specific phenomenon well before the end of the Early Iron Age (the so-called “Dark Age”)?

This study situates these questions in the earliest documented phase of Greek culture – in the palace societies of the Late Bronze Age Aegean (ca. 1400–1200 BCE) – to assess the form or forms which gender assumes several hundred years prior to polis development. To answer this question, this text undertakes a study of the two best documented palatial sites of the Late Bronze Age, Knossos on the island of Crete and Pylos on the Mycenaean mainland, focusing on the women of each site to determine whether a koine of gender practice was in place or whether, in the earliest written documentation in Greek, gender already displayed regional variances.

History of scholarship on Aegean women: Mythological and iconographic studies

Scholarship has long been interested in the question of women’s status and activities in pre-Classical Greece. As much of the literary and archaeological evidence for this period seems to allege that the mythological women of the Homeric epics and the few women known from the real-life Geometric-period (10th–8th century) burials occupied economic and political roles very different from those occupied by 5th-century Athenian women. Several scholars postulated that women enjoyed a higher social rank in the earlier period than they did in historical-era Greece.⁸ With the archaeological rediscovery of the Bronze Age (ca. 3000–1100 BCE) civilizations of the Aegean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this scholarly “elevation” of the Female was extended backwards to include the newly discovered women of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. This re-envisioning of women’s position in the Aegean led (and still leads) to the commonplace claim that the women of the Late Bronze Age Aegean occupied a substantially higher status than their historical-period descendants. What exactly the nature of this status difference was, however, has been a source of lively debate. Some researchers, influenced by Bachofen’s Mutterrecht or by Freudian models of societal development, located in the Bronze Age a matriarchal antiquity for Greece, citing such evidence as the mythic traditions recorded in Hesiod’s Theogony.⁹ These scholars read this myth, with its allusions to an early supremacy of Gaia supplanted ultimately by the patriarch Zeus, as perhaps preserving the memory of a much earlier time when the earthly rule of women was overthrown by men.¹⁰ Other readers were more circumspect: a second line of reasoning, seeking a home for the many memorable women of the mythic tradition, was tempted to locate in Greek prehistory a past where women exercised their voices and political muscles – as Helens, Clytemnestras, and Antigones – at a considerably higher level than did real women of the Athenian polis.¹¹ Under such theoretical influences and faced with the many images of prominent women from the Knossos palace frescoes, this argument joined with Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Knossos and the discoverer of the Minoan civilization on Crete, in reading these images as “a sign of a female predominance”¹² in the Bronze Age Aegean.¹³

One hundred years later, an interest in Bronze Age women stil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions of Linear B
• 1 The women of Mycenaean Greece
• 2 Identifying and contextualizing women in the tablets
• 3 Women and production at Pylos
• 4 Women and property holdings at Pylos
• 5 Women at Knossos: production and property
• 6 Women and land tenure at Pylos and Knossos
• 7 Women and religion at Knossos and Pylos
• 8 Conclusions: women in Aegean prehistory
• Appendix A: All mentions of women in the Pylos Tablets
• Appendix B: All mentions of women in the Knossos Tablets
• Bibliography
• Subject index
• Tablet index