The Palatial Period

By 1400 (LH IIIA1 in pottery terms), a handful of palace-based states had emerged on the Greek mainland (Mycenae and Tiryns in the Argolid, Pylos in Messenia, Thebes in Boeotia, and perhaps at Athens, Orchomenos, and elsewhere), apparently because their political elite were able to eliminate rivals in a regional competition for hegemony (Bennet and Davis 1999; Fig. 2.2). These states controlled relatively extensive territories and developed strongly hierarchical political, social, and economic systems (Fig. 2.3), best understood at Pylos thanks to the discovery of an archive of more than 1,100 clay tablets inscribed in Linear B, a syllabic script that represents an archaic form of the Greek language (Chadwick 1994; Ventris and Chadwick 1973; Fig. 2.4). The earliest Linear B archive comes from the palace at Knossos during the period of Mycenaean occupation there. It consists of approximately 4,000 clay tablets from two horizons, the first dating to circa 1400 and the second to the mid-fourteenth century. Most of the remaining tablets are found at the mainland palaces, dating primarily to the destructions at the end of the thirteenth century. In addition to those 1,100 at Pylos, Thebes has yielded around 430, Mycenae 73, Tiryns 24, and Midea 3

The Gods

2.3 Linear B social pyramid. Courtesy of Dimitri Nakassis.

2.4 Linear B tablet PY Tn 996, recording bathtubs and vessels of gold and bronze. Courtesy of the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati.

(Bennet 2008: 181). Linear B signs were also painted onto “inscribed" stirrup jars manufactured on Crete and distributed mainly to the palatial sites.

The archive at Pylos contains administrative records of materials entering and exiting the palace; allocations of raw materials to craft workers, of dependent workers and their rations to various projects and industries, and of food and drink for feasts; taxation and land records; conscription of personnel to man fleets; and other transactions (Shelmerdine and Bennet 2008). There are no signs of literary, legal, historical, or liturgical content. The “top-down" perspective of the tablets has encouraged a tendency to portray the Mycenaean palaces as impersonal structures whose managerial control was “pervasive, monolithic and monopolistic" (Bennet 2001: 25), based partly on comparison with obsolete notions of an “Asiatic" palatial economy in the Near East (Cherry and Davis 1999: 94—95). Recently, scholars have reassessed the evidence and increasingly asserted the existence of palatial and nonpalatial sectors of the economy. In reality, these were not entirely separate, non-intersecting realms of activity, but in certain areas of agriculture and craft production the palaces may have shown little interest or exerted little control (Galaty 1999; Halstead 1992a, 1992b, 1999, 2001; Parkinson 1999). Commodities produced from ubiquitous sources, such as pottery and marine products, may have circulated in independent, local markets (Hruby 2006; Knappett 2001; Palaima 1997; Whitelaw 2001a).

The Mycenaean palaces prospered in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, corresponding to ceramic phases LH IIIA and LH IIIB. Settlement numbers rose and reached a second-millennium peak in this period. In the northeastern Pelo-ponnese, settlements effectively doubled around the Saronic Gulf (Siennicka 2002: figs. 1, 2), and the palace state at Mycenae pursued an expansive policy by incorporating the Nemea Valley, the Berbati Valley, and the Saronic Gulf region in succession (Schallin 1996; Tartaron 2010; Wright 2004). Although Mycenae was the greatest palace center on the Greek mainland, its scale was modest when compared with contemporary Near Eastern cities (Hope Simpson 1981; Whitelaw 2001b), with a continuously settled area of more than 32 hectares and a population around 6,400, assuming a density of 200 people per hectare (Bennet 2008: 187; French 2002: 64). The extent to which Mycenae dominated the particularly complex political environment of the Argolid remains a matter of some debate: in addition to fortified citadels at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Midea, urban centers flourished at Argos, Lerna, Nauplion, and Asine (Kilian 1988). Although Mycenae was never equaled in wealth and complexity (Voutsaki 2010), so many substantial settlements may indicate political instability with the likelihood of shifting alliances and threats (Voutsaki 1998: 56, 2010: 102—104). The lack of systematic survey of the Argive Plain hampers finer-resolution information on the impact of the interactions among the major centers, as reflected at local scales. Tiryns is assumed to be the main harbor for the Argolid; paleocoastal reconstruction places the shore about one kilometer from Tiryns' walls in the

Late Bronze Age (Zangger 1994a), though as elsewhere no physical traces of harbor facilities remain. In LH IIIB, strong similarities between Mycenae and Tiryns in the architecture of citadel and palace, along with comparable (but not identical) import records (Cline 1994: 89—90), suggest that they worked in concert and not as adversaries (Maran 2003).

In the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, communication within the Mycenaean world flourished, giving rise to many commonalities in material culture and practice. This so-called koine is best seen in fineware pottery styles of the LH IIIA and IIIBl phases (gradually disintegrating in LH IIIB2), close similarities in Linear B scribal language, and a widespread Mycenaean religious ideology represented by ubiquitous anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures and figurines. Yet the expansion and consolidation of Mycenaean culture was not a uniform phenomenon at any scale. A survey of Mycenaean influence in the different geographical regions adjacent to the Greek mainland, such as the Cycladic and Dodecanese islands, northern Greece, and the northern Aegean islands, shows a variable penetration of Mycenaean culture that does not correlate with simple determinants such as distance or ease of access (Mee 2008: 365—81). For example, during the palatial period, Mycenaean influence in the Cyclades is seen largely in the transformation of pottery styles, while on Rhodes in the more distant Dodecanese islands, Mycenaean pottery, weapons, and jewelry were placed in Mycenaean-style chamber tombs starting in the later fifteenth century. Regional variability is also apparent in the core area, as attested by persistent regionalism in architecture (Darcque 2005) and pottery (Mommsen et al. 2002; Mountjoy 1990, 1999). Similarly, the organization of political and economic life in the Mycenaean heartland existed on a conceptual continuum from direct palatial control to independence from any center. The temporal and geographical expression of these variations was a patchwork in which rates of consolidation of outlying territories varied, and regional and microregional identities were often paramount in the absence of subordination to a palace state (Tartaron 2010).