Mycenaean

Divisa in otto sezioni, nasce come approfondimento di conoscenza della straordinaria civiltà, ricordata nei testi ittiti col nome di Aḫḫijawa, che, intorno alla metà del II millennio a.C., prende forma nella Grecia continentale, definita micenea dal nome del più importante sito di questa fase, Micene in Argolide. Essa occuperà l’intero arco della tarda età del Bronzo in Grecia, tra il XVII/ XVI e l’XI sec. a.C., definito Tardo Elladico.

Le tematiche in cui è suddiviso il progetto sono dedicate agli aspetti caratteristici della società micenea tramite testimonianze della cultura materiale che meglio potessero riflettere la ricchezza e la complessità sociale in questa fase della storia del Mediterraneo.

Bibliotheca Archaeologica, 81
2024, 314 pp.
Brossura, 21 x 28 cm
Catalogo della mostra Museo Archeologico Regionale “Paolo Orsi”, Siracusa - dal 11 maggio-9 ottobre 2024
ISBN: 9788891332912
ISSN: 2240-8347

Me-za-na is a name documented on two Mycenaean tablets, cf. PY Cn 3.1 & Sh 736. It can be interpreted either as a place name or as goddess name. Should me-za-na refer to a place, it would be the antecedent of the place name Messenia in the Bronze Age. Otherwise, it would refer to a goddess completely unknown in the first millennium save that it would be the eponym of Messenia. The purpose of this paper is to show that the first possibility is more likely, as well as to elucidate the consequences of this interpretation.

This paper is a survey of the pre-Hellenic names in -u documented in Linear B. They are mostly treated as -u- stem names, but these names are rare in Greek and can be classified into three main categories: -u- stem common nouns used as names, foreign names, and hypocoristics. The last category is post-Homeric, therefore we do not expect to find it in Mycenaean Greek. However, pre-Hellenic names in -u are remarkably common. Most of these names are attested in Knossian tablets and they exhibit a number of features that show their Minoan origin: -u- stem women's names, which are virtually unknown in the first millennium; some traces of their adaptation into Greek morphological paradigms where they were made thematic when masculine and names in -ώ when feminine; and their correspondence with other Minoan elements documented in Linear A and in Linear B. Ultimately, these pre-Hellenic names barely survived in the first millennium.

The paper discusses an EIA tumulus grave located in the area of Maritsa
valley, near the village of Novo Selo, Stamboliyski Region. Given its ‘unusual’ character, it is surprising that after the first publication in 2004, it was mentioned scarcely or is absent from the discussions in the literature. Having analyzed the specifics of the grave goods it was possible to argue that the complex should be dated no later than to the 8th century BC. The
comparisons with similar synchronous and diachronic complexes from the Balkans and the Aegean region as well – the so-called ‘burials with weapons’, or ‘princely graves’ – allowed to outline its key role in the future discussions on the local specifics of the processes that took shape in Thrace during the EIA, e.g. the formation of new social identities and the emerging of local elites.

This paper presents the first preliminary isotopic data of skeletal (animal and human) remains recovered from Tomb A at the Mycenaean archaeological site of Kastrouli (Phocis) during the excavation periods from 2016 to 2021. The study also reports the results of the osteological analysis (minimum number of individuals, sex and age-at-death estimation) of several prenatal and adult bone fragments which were found commingled with animal remains in Tomb B, and Buildings 1 and 2. The majority of the animal remains were identified as domesticated species, i.e. Ovis aries, Capra hircus, Bos taurus and Sus scrofa domesticus. Other animal species present were Alectoris, Lepus, and a few different species of gastropod shells (Cerithium, Tarantinaea lignaria, Patella sp.). Isotopic analysis (δ13C, δ15N) of 12 humans and four animals with good quality collagen indicates a mixed diet incorporating significant amounts of domestic animal protein, plants (some potential evidence for C4), and possibly some marine contribution, all of which are archaeologically documented.

We undertook a large-scale study of Neolithic and Bronze Age human mobility on Crete using biomolecular methods (isotope analysis, DNA), with a particular focus on sites dating to the Late Bronze Age (‘Late Minoan’) period. We measured the strontium and sulphur isotope values of animal remains from archaeological sites around the island of Crete to determine the local baseline values. We then measured the strontium and sulphur values of humans from Late Neolithic and Bronze Age sites. Our results indicate that most of the humans have sulphur and strontium isotope values consistent with being local to Crete, showing no evidence for a wide-scale movement of people from the Greek mainland or other areas away from Crete in these time periods. However, we found four individuals from the late Bronze Age (Late Minoan III) cemetery of Armenoi with sulphur isotope values not typically found in Crete and are instead consistent with an origin elsewhere. This cemetery at Armenoi also has one of...

Rjabchikov, Sergei V., 2024. The Decoding of Three Minoan Hieroglyphic Records. Cross-readings of Words. In: I.I. Ivanovskaya and M.V. Posnova (eds.) Sovremennye issledovaniya: Teoriya i praktika. Sbornik statey VIII Mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii, sostoyavsheysya 8 iyulya 2024 g. v g. Petrozavodske. Petrozavodsk: International Center for Scientific Partnership “New Science”, pp. 83-97.

Abstract: In this work, Sergei V. Rjabchikov has studied three Minoan records put down with the help of signs of the hieroglyphic script. Several Linear A and Cypro-Minoan texts have been interpreted also. In this investigation, the methods of structural and contrastive linguistics were used.

Key words: Minoan glyphs, Linear A, Linear B, Cypro-Minoan script, Crete, Cyprus, ancient Egypt, Tel Haror, Odyssey, Homer, Lexicon, Hesychius, history, archaeology, linguistics, economy of ancient word.

Аннотация: В настоящей работе автор изучил три минойские надписи, выполненные с помощью иероглифической письменности. Также переведены надписи линейного письма А и кипро-минойского письма.  В исследовании были применены методы структурной и контрастивной лингвистики.

Ключевые слова: минойские иероглифы, линейное письмо А, линейное письмо Б, кипро-минойское письмо, Крит, Кипр, древний Египет, Тель Харор, «Одиссея», Гомер, «Лексикон», Гесихий, история, археология, лингвистика, экономика древнего мира.

When Schliemann wrote about the Lower City of Mycenae, he referred to the topographical location of the settlement and the hierarchical relationship between the elites who lived on the acropolis and the residents of the town. Although he acknowledged that the remains he witnessed were Cyclopean in nature, which imparted some value on those residences, he was much more interested in the magnificent tholos tombs and the mythological figures he believed rested therein.

Today, references to Lower Towns still evoke the top-down social and political arrangement by which the residents of the settlement were dependent on and inferior to the elites on the acropolis. While this may have been the case for some palatial centers at some times, this paper looks outside that framework and considers the settlement of Mycenae not as a Lower Town but instead as a Settlement composed of entities with their own agency.

The University of California, Berkeley and Archaeological Society excavations at Petsas House, directed by Kim Shelton, have uncovered evidence that sheds light on the settlement of Mycenae in the 14th c BCE, a period when power (political, social, economic, and ideological) was still being consolidated on the acropolis. Petsas House was located on the Pezoulia ridge in part of the settlement unknown to Schliemann. Excavations there have revealed that the structure was an elite residence but also a multi-functional point of production and large-scale storage of ceramic vessels and figurines. Although there are finds that might indicate that the house was a palatially-dependent workshop, including Linear B documents, the investigation of vessels and the choices made by potters during their production suggest that the workshop operated independent of the palace and served the needs of the local population alongside those of the palatial elites. This suggests that Petsas House was not an attached workshop or an extension of the palace but was an autonomous part of the Settlement which navigated between the palace and the general population, fulfilling the demands of both while also experimenting and innovating on their own terms. By extension, the position of the Petsas House workshop - within the settlement and juxtaposed with the Palace rather than dependent on it - encourages reconsideration of Schliemann’s notion of the Lower City.

Pseudo-archaeology has become a mainstream form of infotainment and contributes to the public distrust of scholarly knowledge that has become a hallmark of the current ‘Post Truth’ era. In this article, I explore the relationship between professional archaeology and serious research that can be understood as pseudo-archaeology: the search for Homeric Ithaca. In the last twenty years, several proposals have been made for the location of the Palace of Odysseus in the Ionian islands. Whereas archaeological scholars and authorities have been ignoring these proposals, they gained widespread public popularity. According to Bruno Latour and others, a new epistemology is necessary to restore trust in academic knowledge. Following this, I argue that professional archaeologists should not ignore, or even ridicule research such as that into Homeric Ithaca. Rather than debating which facts are right or wrong, we should use it to better explain the backgrounds of knowledge about the past.

The paper is published as Open Access and you can read it and download by clicking on the DOI link above.


Please find below the abstract of the paper translated in English:

The western Anatolia and the eastern Aegean region during the Late Bronze Age (1600-1200 BCE) was the meeting point of three civilizations: the local, the Hittite, and the Mycenaean. Until recently, the area was considered a battleground between the Mycenaeans and the Hittites. In recent decades, this perception has begun to be reconsidered, and the importance of local populations in the intercultural contacts of the wider region is gradually being recognized.

This article will attempt to highlight how a comprehensive archaeological and philological study of western Anatolia can lead to a more coherent interpretation. In order to emphasize the active role of the local population in intercultural exchanges, the case of Panaztepe will be briefly presented. The disappearance of Mycenaean pottery in the cemeteries of the settlement during the Late Helladic III B period (1300-1200 BCE) is a phenomenon of particular significance, which will be interpreted with the help of Hittite texts, revealing their crucial role in providing more comprehensive historical interpretations.

We present Isotòpia, an open-access database compiling over 36,000 stable isotope measurements (δ13C, δ15N, δ18O, δ34S, 87Sr/86Sr, 206Pb/204Pb, 207Pb/204Pb, 208Pb/204Pb, 207Pb/206Pb, and 208Pb/206Pb) on human, animal, and plant bioarchaeological remains dating to Classical Antiquity (approximately 800 BCE - 500 CE). These were recovered from different European regions, particularly from the Mediterranean. Isotòpia provides a comprehensive characterisation of the isotopic data, encompassing various historical, archaeological, biological, and environmental variables. Isotòpia is a resource for meta-analytical research of past human activities and paleoenvironments. The database highlights data gaps in isotopic classical archaeology, such as the limited number of isotopic measurements available for plants and animals, limited number of studies on spatial mobility, and spatial heterogeneity of isotopic research. As such, we emphasise the necessity to address and fill these gaps in order to unlock the reuse potential of this database.

Rjabchikov, Sergei V., 2024. The Mysteries of Kings of Ancient Mycenae: New Data about Atreus and Agamemnon. In: I.I. Ivanovskaya and M.V. Posnova (eds.) Nauka. Innovatsii. Budushchee - 2024. Sbornik statey Mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii, sostoyavsheysya 13 maya 2024 g. v g. Petrozavodske. Petrozavodsk: International Center for Scientific Partnership “New Science”, pp. 155-160.

Abstract: In this work Sergei V. Rjabchikov has studied three sources of Linear A. As a result, the mythical personages became the real peoples: they were Princess Aerope and King Catreus of the Minoan Crete. The name of King Atreus, the husband of Aerope, and the name of their son, King Agamemnon, both the rules of the early Greeks in Mycenae, the mainland, have been decoded in the two texts of Linear B(A). The author used the methods of structural and contrastive linguistics.

Key words: Linear A, Linear B, Crete, Mycenae, Aerope, Cotreus, Atreus, Agamemnon, history, linguistics.

Аннотация: В настоящей работе автор изучил три источника линейного письма А. Как результат, мифические персонажи стали реальными людьми: это были принцесса Аэропа и царь Катрей на минойском Крите. Имя царя Атрея, мужа Аэропы, и имя их сына, царя Агамемнона, правителей ранних греков в Микенах на материке, были декодированы в двух текстах линейного письма Б(А). Автор применил методы структурной и контрастивной лингвистики.

Ключевые слова: линейное письмо А, линейное письмо Б, Крит, Микены, Аэропа, Котрей, Атрей, Агамемнон, история, лингвистика.

The huge literature on the patterns of hunting in Late Bronze Age Greece includes many examples coming from the iconography on painted pottery and frescoes of Myceneaean palatial sites. The main subjects are deers, bulls, birds boars and, according to the different material supports, it possible to better define the symbolic and ideological meanings of the hunting activity in the élite ritual or cerimonies.
This paper aims at exploring an unknown aspect of hunting in Myceneaean World, where the main protagonist, or victim, is a lion depicted with a collar on the neck. The animali is represented as a lioness without mane and with a large S-shaped band collar. Similar scenes in Mycenean seals are examined in order to reconstruct the mutual symbolic correlation between the exotic animal, its masculine counterparts and the importance in the celebration of elite identities in LBA Aegean. The main question, however, arises that we are in presence of a symbolic hunting, or the depiction of collar on the animal suggest the use of captive animals. Finally, a large comparative analysis on similar hunting lioness iconography in New Kingdom Art of Egypt offers an possible interpretative tool about the circulation and sharing of patterns of ritual hunting connected to the élite in the Mediterranean at the end of the Second Millennium BC.

The Trojan War was a legendary conflict in Greek mythology between the Achaean Greeks against the city of Troy. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology, and it has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably Homer's Iliad. The key to unlocking the historic Trojan war in my opinion, is to first identify who exactly the Trojans, the Amazons, and the Achaeans were in history because these were the major players in the Iliad. In my previous paper  titled “Historical Troy was in Eupatoria near the Amazon city of Themyscira on the Black Sea southern coast”, I talked about the alliance between the Trojans and the Amazons during the war, and how close was Themyscira, the capital of the Amazons, to the city of Troy (which I identified as Eupatoria), just 65 kilometers away from each other. In this paper, I will be discussing the Hayasa-Azzi confederation which I believe to be the Trojan and Amazon alliance during the Trojan war.

The most important Mycenaean goddess is po-ti-ni-ja = Πότνια, ‘Lady’. Many studies discuss whether po-ti-ni-ja is always a goddess or sometimes refers to a woman, and also whether she is always the same goddess. In this paper I summarise the features of the Mycenaean po-ti-ni-ja regarding these two issues, and I explain the changes from the Mycenaean word to the πότνια of the First Millennium BC.

Mycenaean Greek, like Greek of the first millennium BC, has three numbers
well attested in the Linear B texts: singular, plural, and dual. Nevertheless, both the shortcomings of the Mycenaean syllabary and the occasional spelling errors and inaccuracies often make impossible to recognize the number of some forms. The present contribution will focus on the expression of number in the Linear B inscriptions from Mycenae, which has been paid less attention than in the much larger corpora from Knossos and Pylos, in particular on the formal variations on tablet Au 102, a list or workmen, on the Ge series, whose texts refer to aromatic plants, on the Oe series, which records wool allocations to several people, and on tablet Ue 611, which records several kinds of vessels.

Analysis of the Mycenaean Greek term to-no-e-ke-te-ri-jo (recorded on PY Fr 1222), which can be either *θορνο-hελκτήριον ‘the festivity of the drawing of the throne’ or *θορνο-εγχετήριον ‘the festivity of pouring libations at/from the throne’. It refers to a ritual with the throne as a religious
symbol of power, which has Hittite parallels.

In the footsteps of Morpurgo Davies (1998), who compared the personal names ending
in -i in Mycenaean Greek to their equivalents in alphabetic Greek found in Attica and Arcadia, I have compared several formations of Mycenaean personal names attested in Mycenae and Thebes to their equivalents in Greek included in two volumes of LGPN (II: Attica, and III.A: The Peloponnese, Western Greece, Sicily, and Magna Graecia). A clear contrast between Mycenaean and first millennium Greek is observed in some formations with respect to their relative frequency.

The longest part of the Mycenaean “palatial period”, Late Helladic III A2/B (c. 1370–1200 B.C.), is often associated with the term “koiné” in archaeological research, as the material culture of these decades appear
to us to be extremely homogeneous. This article critically examines this for the Peloponnese on the basis of a broader range of sources. It points out that the differences in the material culture of this period should not be underestimated, which in turn must be seen in connection with the actions and decisions of the people of the time. All in all, the model of “more homogeneous” living conditions, based on the material culture, is agreed upon – in comparison with our picture of the early Mycenaean period as
well as the post-palatial period. However, the probability of being able to draw compelling conclusions about the political structure in the past, about the concrete territory of a “state”, about the borders, etc., based on material culture, is estimated to be very low.

In war anthropology, strong correlations between social structure and types of wars, and
between types of wars and weaponry have been proposed. Wars in tribal societies are
fought far apart, thus only projectile weapons are used. However, wars amongst chiefdoms
and states are fought both as melee combat and ranged combat. This can at least partially
explain the combined usage of projectile weapons and shock weapons.
Weaponry and their changes in ancient Korean culture were examined in this article.
In the Neolithic, only arrowheads, a projectile weapon, were found. In the Early Bronze
Age, the emergence of the stone dagger gave rise to a weapon combination consisting of
projectile weapons (arrowheads) for ranged combat and hilt weapons (stone daggers) for
melee combat. The appearance of lute-shaped bronze spearheads at around 6th century
B.C, in turn gave rise to a new weapon combination consisting of projectile weapons
(stone or bronze arrowheads), hilt weapons (stone or bronze daggers) and pole weapons (luteshaped
bronze spears). The discovery of Chinese bronze daggers, bronze dagger-axes, bronze
spears, and lute-shaped bronze spearheads dating to ca. 5-4th century B.C. at Shiertaiyingzi
(􂶥􂗝􈕆􆘑􃲳) illustrates the continued trend of increased sophistication in weapon combination.
This weapon combination spread with the Slender Bronze Dagger Culture to the
Liaodong and Korean peninsulas, and then to the Japanese Archipelago at ca. early 2nd
century B.C. The combined use of projectile and shock weapons signifies the emergence of
a new type of war that includes both ranged combat and melee combat. In studies of war
anthropology, this type of war is only deemed possible in a society where the leader had
a sufficient level of coercive power. The emergence and spread of such a weapon combination
can be seen as a material manifestation of the establishment of such coercive power
which indicates the advent and formation of early states.