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Women in Mycenaean Greece: The Linear B Tablets from Pylos and Knossos
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 more 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 more 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.
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 more 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.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
390 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 9, 2020
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 errors⁰ (much more common in the tables than the main text) cannot undermine.
Because Classical Athens is a society that clearly became much more 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 corvée labour on the model of Near-Eastern city states rather than the open-ended slave or wage¹ labour at Pylos, and demonstrates that, as in Iron Age Greece, religion had the power to upset gender relations significantly (at least at Pylos).
Not all of her conclusions are as convincing, though (I don't agree that there's evidence the palaces were arranging marriages, for example²), 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 more 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.
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⁰ 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 Φἄναξ", for which she found five separate references without noticing the stray Φ.
ἄναξ actually sees a lot of abuse, also variously turning into ᾶναξ and even )άναξ, which at least seems to be a straightforward if inexplicable OCR issue.
¹ 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.
² The argument is that people described with different ethnics³ 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.
³ :(
Because Classical Athens is a society that clearly became much more 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 corvée labour on the model of Near-Eastern city states rather than the open-ended slave or wage¹ labour at Pylos, and demonstrates that, as in Iron Age Greece, religion had the power to upset gender relations significantly (at least at Pylos).
Not all of her conclusions are as convincing, though (I don't agree that there's evidence the palaces were arranging marriages, for example²), 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 more 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.
--------
⁰ 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 Φἄναξ", for which she found five separate references without noticing the stray Φ.
ἄναξ actually sees a lot of abuse, also variously turning into ᾶναξ and even )άναξ, which at least seems to be a straightforward if inexplicable OCR issue.
¹ 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.
² The argument is that people described with different ethnics³ 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.
³ :(
November 13, 2014
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.
February 15, 2015
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 3,200 years ago.
March 29, 2026
being honest did not fully read it (probably about 90%) as i had to skip over some parts cause i just had little time to send my essay, but will probably come back to it. found it very insightful honestly very palatable and may or may not agree with everything Barbara says —valid theories supported by the sometimes very fragmentary evidence— but it is a great analysis. i was 0 aware of anything related to mycenaean culture and this was great.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews