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Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos

2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.5.1.0116

2166-3556

Natalie Abell,

In Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos, Nakassis undertakes a detailed study of personal names attested in the Linear B archives at the Late Bronze Age palace of Pylos. His major conclusions—that many named persons in the tablets were probably regional elites who fulfilled multiple roles for the palaces and that they operated both under and outside the direct oversight of the palace—upend heuristic models that have relied on separating the Mycenaean palace from Mycenaean society at large. In doing so, the author offers a new perspective on the structuring of economic and social relationships in Bronze Age Pylos.The main discussion of this book is organized in five chapters, followed by a lengthy appendix (pp. 187–414). The text contains minimal specialized jargon, and that which exists is plainly defined. The book is clearly written, and, for the most part, should be accessible to readers who are not Linear B specialists.Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the project. It includes an up-to-date overview of the institutional framework that has long been a main topic of interest in Linear B studies, along with a summary of recent critiques. Building on these analyses, the author advocates moving beyond studies that define bureaucratic offices in order to instead examine the significance of individuals and non-palatial (or para-palatial) agency in shaping Mycenaean economy and society (pp. 5–19). Nakassis points out that the nature of the Pylian records, as palatial inventory and accounting lists that incorporate names of many individual people who interacted with the palace over the course of a single year, “can … provide one of the most detailed synchronic discussions of the practices of political authority anywhere in the world” (p. 20).Chapter 2 is a detailed discussion of the methodology by which Nakassis is able to convincingly demonstrate that, in many cases, when one name appears in multiple Linear B texts at Pylos, that name probably represents a single individual rather than different people who share the same name. His approach stands in contrast to previous, more conservative studies, which assumed that identical names typically referred to different homonymous individuals, especially in cases where names were associated with different toponyms. Nakassis argues (pp. 40–48) that a significant factor underlying this conservatism has been the assumption that most individuals named in association with, for example, herding or smithing practices have been assumed to be low-status and, thus, unlikely to appear frequently or in multiple locations in the corpus of texts.In large part, Nakassis' method rests in the particularities of the Pylian texts (pp. 30–36). There are over 1000 tablets from Pylos, yet they are written by relatively few (only 32) scribes. They contain more signs and are generally lengthier than texts from other Mycenaean locations, and most were found in a distinctively administrative setting, the Archives Complex of the palace. Finally, unlike the other palaces, the vast majority of texts from Pylos were probably composed within a circumscribed time period (at most, a year) before being accidentally preserved in the conflagration that destroyed Pylos around 1200 BC. Other features of Mycenaean texts are also noted: the same name does not often appear in situations where it is certain the name must refer to different homonymous individuals, and patronymics are rare and do not seem to have been needed by scribes to distinguish named individuals from one another (pp. 36–39).Nakassis' prosopographical identifications are categorized on a spectrum, as certain, probable, possible, or tenuous (pp. 49–50). His discussion of the prosopographical identification for each personal name attested in the Pylian texts and additional information is detailed in the appendix. In chapter 2, he uses four examples to illustrate his methodology (pp. 50–67), which relies on close lexical and contextual analysis of names in association with other names, patronymics, toponyms, and additional identifying information at different scales within and between texts. The more clear points of contact between names in different documents, the closer his identification (that these names represent the same individual) moves to certain.The methodology outlined in chapter 2 is then employed to analyze the activities of individuals named as smiths and herders (chapter 3) and everybody else (chapter 4). Smiths and herders are singled out in chapter 3 because the documents in which these people appear include many names and seem to represent a large proportion of the original number of tablets devoted to those personnel (p. 73). There are 30 names that appear in texts devoted to both smiths and herders, comprising the largest category of overlapping names (p. 80). Smiths were a key category for earlier conservative approaches to the identification of homonymous individuals, since smiths with the same name appear in association with diverse toponyms, while smiths and herders with the same name almost never appear in association with the same toponym. Nakassis emphasizes that, without knowing which geographical locations most of the toponyms refer to, it is entirely possible that different toponyms might have been located relatively near each other in physical space (pp. 41–44, 77–80). In addition, he notes that only four names appear in association with locations that are certainly distant from each other. He also points out that if we do not assume such people must be of low status, it enables us to consider that they might have participated in or overseen activities in different parts of the Pylian territory (p. 87).Chapter 4 focuses on the personnel associated with the military o-ka texts and landowners, followed by discussion of individuals in a variety of other texts. The detailed analysis in both chapters strongly advocates for considering many homonymous individuals as the same people, who, in some cases, engaged in different kinds of activities (e.g., smithing, herding, religious roles, military roles) on behalf of—or at least in ways that were significant to—the palace. Even a conservative reading (accepting only Nakassis' “certain” identifications) demonstrates that some people in leadership and high-status roles (e.g., commanders and military officers in the o-ka texts) were also smiths and herders.Chapter 5 summarizes and expands on Nakassis' conclusions from the preceding chapters. He points out that the ca. 875 named individuals make up less than 2% of the estimated Pylian population (50,000). Nakassis contrasts these named individuals with groups of unnamed craftspeople like textile workers, as well as the vast majority of people (including around 94 percent of adult men and nearly all adult women and children) who do not appear in the texts at all (pp. 156–57). This contrast serves to demonstrate that named individuals constitute a tiny proportion of the overall Pylian population, a proportion that is well within range of the estimated size of elite groups in other ancient societies (p. 173).Nakassis suggests that individuals who appear in multiple texts are more likely to have been considered important by the Pylian palace (and perhaps also by people outside the palace), especially in situations where it seems unlikely that they could have performed all tasks alluded to in the texts by themselves (pp. 156–76). Indeed, most of these individuals are not specialists, but appear in different kinds of texts engaging in multiple tasks rather than appearing in multiple texts referring to the same sorts of activities (p. 161). He argues that some of these individuals, despite the modern convention of calling them “herders” and “smiths,” may have acted in a supervisorial capacity to ensure that particular tasks would be accomplished on behalf of the palace, probably in part by delegating tasks to subordinates and/or kin (pp. 157–58). Although individuals who appear in multiple texts also appear in apparently high-status roles, as mentioned above, these people are only rarely associated with the named offices that have garnered so much scholarly attention. There is no other sign of clear ranking amongst them (pp. 162–65). Rather, Nakassis argues that these individuals seem to fall along a spectrum of degrees of interaction with the palace, and potentially, relative social status (pp. 161, 165–70).Individuals named in the Pylian records almost certainly engaged in economic activities outside of those that linked them to the palace and may well have played an important role in institutions that operated outside of palatial authority, such as the dāmos and religious institutions (pp. 169–72). It is probable that such individuals also accrued significant economic and symbolic benefits through their interactions with the palace, which may have served to further enhance their status in their own communities (pp. 173–76). In addition, the palace benefited from the semi-independent and managerial activities of these people, which would have simplified some aspects of palatial administration (p. 176). Nakassis argues that this sort of parceled delegation of tasks and reliance on local elites may reflect the social and institutional realities within which the palace initially developed and the paths by which some pre-existing resource chains and personal holdings were integrated into the palatial economy (pp. 179–83).An updated catalog of all possible personal names found at Pylos is found in the extensive appendix. This will be a useful resource for future studies that utilize personal names from Pylos. Each name is listed along with its possible renderings in Greek, the degree of confidence over whether or not it is actually a name, the tablets on which the name appears, the toponyms associated with each occurrence, and the location of that toponym if known. In addition, Nakassis evaluates whether names that appear on multiple tablets are the same individual on his scale of certain, probable, possible, or tenuous, followed by a justification of his designation(s). He also provides a helpful shorthand numerical code to indicate the minimum, maximum, and probable number of individuals represented by each name. A brief description of anything known about the named individuals, including their designated roles on the tablets, is also included as part of each catalog entry.There are few criticisms to be made about the volume. Typographical and editorial errors are few. Although relevant lines in the tables of chapter 3 are highlighted to help the reader easily find smiths represented in the Cn series, one might wish that the discussion of tablets in chapter 2 would signify more consistently the location of relevant names. For example, in a discussion of a man named Komāwens (ko-ma-we) in tablet An 519 (p. 50), the line number is not called out in the text preceding the inscription. Given the short length of the inscriptions, it is a relatively minor problem that is easily overcome. Nakassis mentions the potential problem of heteronymy at the beginning of his discussion of methodology in chapter 2 (pp. 35–36), but unlike homonymy, the case for and against heteronymy as a feature of the Pylian texts is not pursued in detail. This does not seem to be a major omission, however, since heteronymy seems to have been less important in previous studies than concerns over homonymy.This book offers a significant new way of thinking about how elite Mycenaean individuals interacted with palatial institutions. Nakassis provides a nuanced perspective on how the palatial system and Mycenaean society were interwoven and how these people and institutions functioned in relation to each other. Given the high quality of both the data and the analysis, the book will be a valuable resource for specialists in the study of the Aegean Bronze Age and will serve as a useful case study for scholars interested more broadly in the organization and operation of early states.