Women's role in minoan society
A serious work of scholarship based on the Linear B texts from two important cities Pylos and Knossos These texts written in an ancient form of Greek are associated with the Mycenaean period and peoples Olsen has mined the texts carefully and thoughtfully to recover as much information as possible about women in the 14th century BC Since these texts only cover certain topics all of which are economic in nature her discussion necessarily focuses on women s economic roles their occupations kind of employment civil status their places of origin and so on In the process she uncovers differences between the two cities in how women are employed by the palace government and to what extent they are enslaved or not able to own or control property or not which suggest that at Knossos some Minoan customs or cultural values mingled with those of the conquering Mycenaeans While the limitations of the texts may be frustrating to some readers it is what it is the texts are what they are Olsen s work should make it possible for further comparative studies and contributes to the ongoing study of gender relations in antiquity English A very dense dry but exhaustive look at the women mentioned in the Pylos and Knossos Linear B archives Olsen s scholarly methods in exploring the gender politics and disparities of the women who lived and worked under the administrations of the Pylos and Knossos palaces are meticulous She teases out information about women s roles in the palatial systems from tablets that are occasionally very fragmentary and puts names to real life women who lived in Messenia and Crete 3200 years ago English Suffers from being an academic paper that was then haphazardly edited into a book that can t quite make up its mind about how accessible it wants to be to the general public though in the end it settles on not very Olsen is also a consummate bullshitter the kind of academic who thinks being able to slap half a dozen references onto a sentence a priori justifies its existence and that this is in fact what academic writing is but there is genuine substance here that even the surprising number of typographical errors much common in the tables than the main text cannot undermine. Epub women in mycenaean greek culture Because Classical Athens is a society that clearly became much sexist fairly recently and Homer contains suggestions of apparently matriarchal or at least less unequal societies some people have at various points hoped to locate a gender equal utopia in Bronze Age Greece though few believe that still Olsen puts the final nail in that coffin at least as far as Pylos and Knossos are concerned She also demonstrates significant differences in gender inequality between the two however with Pylos on the mainland being considerably worse about it than Knossos on Crete which was a Greek administration on top of a still significantly Minoan population convincingly argues that much of the labour performed by female workgroups at Knossos is best characterised as corv e labour on the model of Near Eastern city states rather than the open ended slave or wage labour at Pylos and demonstrates that as in Iron Age Greece religion had the power to upset gender relations significantly at least at Pylos. Ebook women in mycenaean greek culture Not all of her conclusions are as convincing though I don t agree that there s evidence the palaces were arranging marriages for example and it s important to keep in mind that even when they re preserved well the Linear B tablets really only care about women who produce for the palaces women who own land in some capacity and women involved in cult activities at a high level there were certainly many than the two thousand unambiguously reconstructed women at Pylos and the thousand at Knossos and they re all entirely invisible to this line of study The women who are visible are nonetheless an important piece of the puzzle and Women in Mycenaean Greece is a valuable contribution to the discussion I know it s hard to find editors for academic writing and this is a petty thing to remark on but there really were enough of them for it to be grating to the point of calling Olsen s credibility into question though with as far as I can tell one inconsequential exception they really were all just typos and not errors of substance The one that put me over the edge was the claim that there is full consensus on the etymology of the term wa na ka wanax as for which she found five separate references without noticing the stray actually sees a lot of abuse also variously turning into and even which at least seems to be a straightforward if inexplicable OCR issue Olsen comes out in favour of interpreting these women as abducted slaves Her arguments in favour of that are not unconvincing but her arguments against them being wage labourers instead kind of are The argument is that people described with different ethnics are sometimes shown to have children which I guess Greeks are supposed to be too xenophobic for That s really just what happens when you concentrate a bunch of people in one location though they re going to fuck whether you want them to or not English Originally read for university studies English
Women in Mycenaean Greece is the first book length study of women in the Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Greece and the only to collect and compile all the references to women in the documents of the two best attested sites of Late Bronze Age Greece Pylos on the Greek mainland and Knossos on the island of Crete The book offers a systematic analysis of women s tasks holdings and social and economic status in the Linear B tablets dating from the 14th and 13th centuries BCE identifying how Mycenaean women functioned in the economic institutions where they were best attested production property control land tenure and cult Analysing all references to women in the Mycenaean documents the book focuses on the ways in which the economic institutions of these Bronze Age palace states were gendered and effectively extends the framework for the study of women in Greek antiquity back than 400 years Throughout the book seeks to establish whether gender practices were uniform in the Mycenaean states or differed from site to site and to gauge the relationship of the roles and status of Mycenaean women to their Archaic and Classical counterparts to test if the often proposed theories of a egalitarian Bronze Age accurately reflect the textual evidence The Linear B tablets offer a unique if under utilized point of entry into women s history in ancient Greece documenting nearly 2000 women performing over fifty task assignments From their decipherment in 1952 one major gap in the scholarly record remained a full accounting of the women who inhabited the palace states and their tasks ranks and economic contributions Women in Mycenaean Greece fills that gap recovering how class rank and other social markers created status hierarchies among women how women as a group functioned relative to men and where different localities conformed or diverged in their gender practices Women in Mycenaean Greece The Linear B Tablets from Pylos and Knossos.
