Mycenaean Palace Economy: Wool Ledgers, Kiln-Baked Tablets and a Dark Age

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The Mycenaean centers of Mycenae, Pylos and Tiryns rose on the Greek mainland in the Late Bronze Age, roughly 1750 to 1050 BC, and a 2022 genetic study by Iosif Lazaridis and colleagues showed their people combined early European farmer ancestry with a later influx linked to Yamnaya-like steppe migrants who likely brought horses and an Indo-European language. That language was revealed as an archaic Greek when Michael Ventris, not a classical scholar, cracked Linear B in the 1950s by treating its roughly 87 signs as a syllabary and testing the name Knossos. Hittite records complained of an aggressive western power called Ahhiyawa, and Egyptian texts from the reign of Thutmose III named a land called Danaya.

Under the wanax, the king, a hierarchy ran down to the damos and enslaved workers, and palace storerooms full of pithoi tracked grain, wine, perfumed oil, bronze and the wool of some 100,000 sheep at Knossos. Some scholars now read the Pylos land records as preparations for state religious feasts rather than feudal taxation. Mycenaean stirrup jars reached Italy, Spain, Troy, Cyprus and Egypt in exchange for gold, Cypriot copper and scarce tin. Around 1200 to 1180 BC the palaces burned, and possible causes include a Dorian invasion, Sea Peoples raids, drought shown in pollen cores, or internal revolt. Linear B was forgotten, and Greeks went without writing until they adopted a Phoenician-derived alphabet in the 8th century BC.

• The fires that destroyed the palaces baked the clay tablets, preserving the records that let us read them today.
• The last Pylos tablets record watchers sent to the coast and bronze taken from temple offerings to make spear points.
• Dozens of bronze arrowheads were found in the destruction debris at the citadel of Midea.
• Egyptian records from about 1175 BC list a raider group called the Ekwesh, a name strikingly close to Ahhiyawa.
• Tiryns briefly expanded its lower town after the first wave of destruction while Pylos was abandoned for good.