Mycenaean Government and Social Organization
Carl Seaquist
(Slide 1) Welcome to Carl Seaquist’s lecture on Mycenaean government and social organization. Our
knowledge of this period comes from three sources: archaeology, written evidence from the Bronze
Age, and later written sources. Of these, the latter are almost worthless: faint recollections of the
Bronze Age have been found in the texts of Homer, but it appears that the Greeks of the classical and
archaic periods preserved at best a hazy knowledge of the Bronze Age. The other two sources are quite
useful, though limited. In fact, you’ll find very quickly that our evidence is enough to know what
questions to ask, but rarely enough to get a satisfactory answer. This can be frustrating, but also
exciting.
(Slide 2) Let’s start with the written evidence from outside the Greek world, because it’s so limited in
nature. Several Hittite documents appear to mention the Greeks. The Hittites controlled an empire in
central and eastern Anatolia in the middle of the second millennium BC. Hittite texts mention a group
called the Ahhiyawa, which sounds curiously like the Greek word “Achaeans.” In the classical period,
Achaea was a small region in the northern Peloponnese, but in Homer’s Iliad, which recounts the story
of the Trojan war, the name “Achaean” is used in a more general sense roughly synonymous with
“Greek.” Recently, scholars working on the geography of Anatolia have argued persuasively that
Millawanda, a city that the Hittites sacked around 1320 BC, is the same as the Greek city of Miletos.
Millawanda was allied with the Ahhiyawa and with Arzawa, whose capital Apasa has now been
identified with Ephesos.
At one level, it is not surprising that the Mycenaeans were known to the major powers of the eastern
Mediterranean, since we know they engaged in trade with their neighbors. However, Greece in the
Bronze Age appears somewhat provincial: the diplomatic archives from the period, for example, do not
contain any letters to or from Mycenaean rulers. This is consistent with the fact that Mycenaean culture
seems indebted primarily to the Cretans, and in many ways seemed to have developed fairly
independently.
(Slide 3) Let’s next look at the indigenous evidence (archaeology and Linear B) together. The
Mycenaean states would appear to be kingdoms, but I say that with caution. One word that means
“king” in classical Greek, wanax, occurs as a noun 20 times in the roughly 5,000 texts that survive, but
only two times where the king plays an active role. The adjective “royal” also occurs. But what kind of a
king was the wanax? How limited or unlimited were his powers? We don’t know. Models exist from
the ancient world for a wide range of kingly power: the kings of classical Sparta had quite limited roles,
whereas the Pharaoh in Egypt was almost entirely sovereign. The palaces contained what we would
consider thrones, and the iconographic evidence seems consistent with the fact that the wanax was a
king in some sense of the term, but again, what the powers of the king were are, for the most part, mere
supposition.
Another word that in the classical period more often means king, gwasileus (classical basileus), also
occurs in the Linear B texts, but here it seems to mean someone of fairly high standing who manages
groups of workers. We have the titles of other officials, but their roles can only be very approximately
identified based on the contexts in which they are mentioned. In the case of a title like diwieus, which
literally would mean “Zeus-priest,” we can guess that etymology is a useful guide to the person’s
function, but even here it is possible that the priest took on other duties not implied directly by the term
itself.
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(Slide 4) A related question is how unified Greece was under the Mycenaeans. Homer seems to paint a
picture in which each region or city had its own ruling class, and the various cities were tied by mutual
assistance pacts at best, and while in general Homer can’t be trusted as a good source, in this case he
might paint a picture that is accurate in its main outlines. The more scholars study the individual
palaces, the more different they appear. In fact, there’s no direct evidence that the different palatial
states were under any sort of central contol. Economically, there is a little evidence of the movement of
goods between palaces, but a great deal of evidence for movement within the area controlled by each
palace. In what follows, let’s call the area controlled by a given palace a “palace state” – that’s probably
very misleading in all kinds of ways, but it has the advantage of being convenient.
Internal organization of palace states
(Slide 5) We know the most about the palace at Pylos, because the area on which it was placed was
later abandoned, in contrast to Athens, for example, where we have minimal evidence from the Bronze
Age because it was occupied all through the classical period and beyond. We know that Pylos managed
two administrative provinces, one near to the palace and other farther away, and that each was divided
into 8 or 9 districts. We know the names of these units, names that do not reoccur in later periods,
unlike Knossos and Thebes – this would be consistent with the fact that Pylos was abandoned after the
Bronze Age, because it would seem that geographic names in Greece had a tendency to survive, even
when the political organization of the area changed radically, as long as there was some continuity in
settlement.
(Slide 6) The distribution of Bronze Age palaces is interesting: they tended to occur mostly densely in
the Argolid and in Attica, whereas in other areas (Laconia, and the entire northern Peloponnese) they
were entirely absent. This doesn’t mean that those latter areas were depopulated, or that they were
controlled by distant centers. No doubt there were a variety of political structures in Bronze Age
Greece, but only the palace societies have left the kind of evidence that we can get even an outline of
how they were organized. Still, the lack of a palace in the Corinthia is somewhat surprising, based on its
agricultural wealth and later prominence. It would appear that Mycenae’s power extended into the
area around the later city of Corinth. If this is correct, then it could help explain why the Corinthia never
developed its own palace.
(Slide 7) Thus better evidence exists for Messenia than for other areas of the Bronze Age mainland: in
fact this is the only area where we can any reasonable idea of the evolution of a particular palace state.
From MH through LH II, we can trace archaeologically the growth of several local centers. As the
population movements resulted in a small number of these settlements growing at the expense of
others, it seems likely that power became gradually centralized in fewer and fewer of these centers,
which exerted power over larger and larger areas. The LH organization of the Pylian state may preserve
evidence of this process: the provinces may represent regions that were unified at a late stage, and the
smaller districts may represent earlier power centers, which at one time had been independent. Seen
from the perspective of Pylos, the Pylian state may have at one time only been constituted by the closer
province, and the further province would have been acquired at a later time. Of course, this is all
supposition, but it seems consistent with the written and material evidence.
(Slide 8) It may be helpful to give an indication of the relative size of settlements at various times in the
Aegean Bronze Age. Lerna, in the Argolid, was about 3.5 acres in EH II, and held maybe 50-100
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households. A hectare, by the way, is just under 5,000 square yards, or about 90% of a football field in
area. [If you want more exact measures, a football field is 360 x 160 feet, or 57,600 sq. ft., whereas an
acre, when square, is 209 feet on a side.] In the MH period, the largest settlement found by
archaeologists is about 2.5 acres. In contrast, the LH palace at Pylos covered about 5 acres, and the
town that surrounded it occupied about 30 acres, with a population of perhaps 3,000 people. The Pylian
state might have controlled 100,000 sheep, and had a thousand women manufacturing textiles. The
entire Pylian state may have been around 50,000 people, or the current population of Jackson, TN. The
town centered at Mycenae was larger, perhaps 80 acres, with a population twice that of Pylos. On
Crete, Knossos in EM III –MM I was perhaps 81 acres, and Phaistos in MM I was perhaps 67 acres. So
palace societies were comparable in size in both cultures, but of course palaces developed earlier on
Crete.
Internal structure of palace states
(Slide 9) We know a number of the titles of Mycenaean officials, and have some idea of their relative
rank. In addition to the wanax and gwasileus, titles we know of include lawagetas, hequetas, koreter,
and prokoreter. Lawagetas literally means “leader of the people” whereas hequetas means “follower,”
but of course etymology (the literal meaning of a word, based on the meaning of its components) tells
us little or nothing about its technical use. The lawagetas is mentioned as leading a variety of types of
people at Pylos and Knossos, so it would seem to be a fairly high rank. The koreter seems to have been
the official in charge of any given district, do perhaps “governor” would be an appropriate translation;
then the prokoreter would be the lieutenant governor or governor’s aid.
(Slide 10) There is another class of official for which the Linear B texts do not give a title, which modern
scholars collectively refer to as “Collectors.” The texts treat these individuals as belonging to a class, not
by using a common word to denote them, but by mentioning them the same way in a group of texts that
are written in a standardized (or formulaic) way. The category of collectors was first identified shortly
after the decipherment of Linear B in the texts relating to sheep, wool, and the cloth industries.
To understand how this works, let’s look at the prototypical form of such a record. A representative
sheep record is KN Da 1108:
SHEEPm 200
ki-ta-ne-to su-ri-mo
By convention, words in capital letters (like SHEEP here) are used to transcribe ideograms; male and
female CATTLE, PIGS, SHEEP, GOATS, HORSES, and ASSES are distinguished in Linear B by variations on a
given ideogram (see the examples on the right of the slide), and in transcription they can be indicated by
superscripts, in this case the m following SHEEP. The second line gives a man’s name (ki-ta-ne-to)
followed by a place name (su-ri-mo). Thus, although there is no verb in this record, we could translate it
as “ki-ta-ne-to from su-ri-mo has 200 male sheep.”
(Slide 11) Sometimes, however, a second personal name occurs in such texts, generally in the genitive
(in which case the name would be translated with an “of”, so the genitive of Pericles would mean “of
Pericles”). For example, consider KN Da 1317:
da-i-ze-to qa-mo u-ta-jo-jo SHEEPm 110
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Here u-ta-jo is a collector: his name is in the genitive, as indicated by the ending -jo – in this case the
second -jo, i.e., the fourth syllable. I have underlined personal names in both texts. We may assume
that the first name indicates the person who keeps the animals, and perhaps owns them. But then how
is the second person related to the sheep? In what sense are they his (as the genitive case would seem
to indicate)? A variety of theories have been presented: perhaps the collector is a sort of auditor, who
has been sent out by the palace to check on the condition of the flock, in which the palace has some
stake even though they don’t oversee it on a regular basis. Or perhaps the shepherd is overseeing the
flock for an absentee owner, in which case the “collector” has a personal claim on the animals, rather
than serving as an administrator who represents the palace’s interests, and the sheep don’t in fact
belong to the person in the nominative case – the first person listed.
Regardless, the important point for present purposes is that IF we can read this type of formulaic
language as indicating traditional social relationships and ownership relations, THEN we may consider
the “collectors” to constitute a class even though the texts do not use a technical term to identify them.
(Copyright Slide) This presentation is protected by a Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives license. That means you’re free to share it with others in this form, but only if you give
credit to the copyright holder (Carl Seaquist). You can’t modify it and you can’t use it for commercial
purposes without Carl’s permission. For details on what such a license implies, see the Creative
Commons website: http://creativecommons.org/.
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