A Woman's Lot During The Last Days of Sandy Pylos
If you were an ordinary woman in Messenia around 1200 B.C., your life was rigidly controlled by the state. If you worked in the palace of Nestor at Pylos, under King Enkhelyawon or his lawagetas Werwesios, you could look forward to a life of unending drudgery.
The Linear B tablets of the Pylos archive, as well as the extensive pantry of stacked cups, dishes, and other utensils unearthed by Carl Blegen's excavations, attest to endless tasks of food preparation.
Bath attendants were needed, not so much to scrub the backs of the palatial elite as to fetch, haul, and heat bath water, and to drain the tub afterward.
Scrub maids were needed to scour grease from the hearth in the great megaron, sweep the plastered floors, and bring in sweetening herbs and rushes. Laundresses constantly aired out and washed the palace's linens.
The palace of sandy Pylos was an active palatial residence, and it closely monitored the lives, tasks, and rations of its male and female workers. It did so for its various textile industries, also, and to a degree that we would consider micromanagement.
Women who worked in the state textile industry, which at Pylos was the making of linen cloth, were assigned to workgroups headed by a supervisor, sometimes male, sometimes female. In contrast with Knossos, these working women are never named; they are instead anonymous cogs in an assembly line divided into various tasks. There were the combers, the spinners, the weavers, the finishers, each with their own special designation in Linear B. Knossos specialized in wool, and the workers frequently performed multiple tasks in the textile-making process, and in large part were allowed to do their work in their home villages. The Pylian state, on the other hand, moved its women around to localized production centers, where they were frequently accompanied by their young children but no husbands or male kinsmen. From this fact alone, that these women are traveling around without their male relations, scholars have concluded that they were slaves rather than the free-born corvee workers serving Knossos.
These women had no control over their living arrangements, and certainly none when it came to their own children. Daughters stayed with their mothers and were trained in the mothers' profession, but the state could and did take sons to serve elsewhere, perhaps as laborers, soldiers, or rowers such as those mentioned in the famous Linear B Pylos An675 tablet. The tablets do not specifically state, but it is possible that the Pylian state also arranged marriages, or couplings, for these women in order to produce children.
Whether the situation at Pylos was standard practice for all mainland Mycenaean Greek states remains a topic for speculation. Even elite Pylian women get the silent treatment; there's no mention of Enkhelyawon's queen, and none of the wives or daughters of the nobility are ever named. In Pylos, the only way for a woman to have entered the record in her own right was through the religious sphere. Apparently, this was also the only avenue through which a Pylian woman could hold property. We have the names of two priestesses, Eritha and Karpathia, who both held land and elite goods such as temple bronze on behalf of the gods. Their female subordinates, the "servants of the gods," are also listed as holding religious property.
For those wondering about Knossos, while the fragmentary archives name female workers, it's the elite women who are missing. What about the powerful Minoan priestesses and queens and princesses everybody assumes ruled Knossos? The scribes mention only a priestess or two, but never by name, and I find that a curious thing. Is it possible that the matriarchy of Crete was only ever a modern invention?