The Authors of History 1: Mycenaean 'Scribes'
100 Historical Things, Number 7
When I talked about history as a discipline, and mentioned writing as the primary source for historical enquiry, history13041985 commented about wanting to hear more about who was doing the writing. A historian tries to recreate a picture of a historical period, but inevitably that is based on accounts drawn from a limited pool of people - be they limited by gender, age, wealth, ability, prefessionalism, or whatever. Obviously, the answer to the question of who was doing the writing differs considerably depending on the period under consideration. So, I think the only sensible thing to do is to turn this into a series of occasional posts talking about literacy and the authors of our historical sources in particular periods. Let's start with my favourite...
[It's worth adding a disclaimer right now. Mycenaean epigraphy happens to be the field in which I specialise professionally, so when I talk about it now it's going to be from the point of view of someone who thinks about it too much :) However, when I talk about other periods I'm not going to be giving an expert opinion! I'd welcome accounts from others actually. But I'll start by just talking about something I know very well.]
The Mycenaean Linear B Documents
Around 1450-1200 BC, on Crete and on mainland Greece, there flourished a civilisation that we usually label Mycenaean. We have plenty of archaeological evidence, some of which we can't date as accurately as we would like owing to the methods employed by very early 20th C archaeologists (Evans at Knossos), while a good amount of it was meticulously catalogued and so is very well understood (Blegen at Pylos). We know of the existence of palatial-type economies, where regional centres (Knossos, Pylos, etc.) controlled a considerable proportion of the area's economic activities, and 'redistributed' goods and land to personnel who had particular duties to render services or goods for the palace.
From this setting, almost the only writing that has survived comes in the form of administrative documents. These are clay tablets, written in Greek, in a script that we term Linear B (after Evans). This script is completely unrelated to the later Greek alphabet (there was a Dark Age between the fall of the Mycenaean palaces in the 13th-12th C BC and the advent of the Greek alphabet in the 8th C BC). It is sometimes difficult to read, and being a syllabic script of the open syllable sort, it is not well suited to writing Greek. The subject matter is also rather dry, mostly recording inventories of various goods, and the duties owed to the palace by personnel. So we already have some interpretive problems with the historical documents of the Mycenaean period.
But who was writing the documents? For a long time, it was thought that writing must have been restricted to a scribal class of the Egyptian sort. Meanwhile, some scholars have had a tendency to argue that the surviving clay tablets do not represent the full extent of Mycenaean literacy - because they believe a wider pool of people were writing, but were doing it on 'perishable materials' (e.g. papyrus). If that were the case however, it is astonishing that we do not have traces of low register inscriptions like graffiti. There is almost nothing that does not have a very obvious economic and administrative context.
So, nowadays, the consensus - or at least the consensus that I ascribe to myself (while there are still some scholars who believe in the perishable materials) - is that the clay tablets were written not by scribes as such but by literate administrators, who would go around recording the goods and services they were overseeing in some capacity. Some of these may have been administrators of considerable standing (e.g. Hands 1 and 2 at Pylos). They would still be highly trained in the use of the script, which in itself was an administrative tool. And because the Linear B script required such a high degree of training (hundreds of signs to master, as opposed to our nice streamlined alphabet that we have today, along with lots of conventions about how to lay out information), it is not surprising that there is no evidence for it being used by anyone outside of this administrative context.
I'm going to stop there, but please poke me if you have questions about any of the material here, or if you want more references.
When I talked about history as a discipline, and mentioned writing as the primary source for historical enquiry, history13041985 commented about wanting to hear more about who was doing the writing. A historian tries to recreate a picture of a historical period, but inevitably that is based on accounts drawn from a limited pool of people - be they limited by gender, age, wealth, ability, prefessionalism, or whatever. Obviously, the answer to the question of who was doing the writing differs considerably depending on the period under consideration. So, I think the only sensible thing to do is to turn this into a series of occasional posts talking about literacy and the authors of our historical sources in particular periods. Let's start with my favourite...
[It's worth adding a disclaimer right now. Mycenaean epigraphy happens to be the field in which I specialise professionally, so when I talk about it now it's going to be from the point of view of someone who thinks about it too much :) However, when I talk about other periods I'm not going to be giving an expert opinion! I'd welcome accounts from others actually. But I'll start by just talking about something I know very well.]
The Mycenaean Linear B Documents
Around 1450-1200 BC, on Crete and on mainland Greece, there flourished a civilisation that we usually label Mycenaean. We have plenty of archaeological evidence, some of which we can't date as accurately as we would like owing to the methods employed by very early 20th C archaeologists (Evans at Knossos), while a good amount of it was meticulously catalogued and so is very well understood (Blegen at Pylos). We know of the existence of palatial-type economies, where regional centres (Knossos, Pylos, etc.) controlled a considerable proportion of the area's economic activities, and 'redistributed' goods and land to personnel who had particular duties to render services or goods for the palace.
From this setting, almost the only writing that has survived comes in the form of administrative documents. These are clay tablets, written in Greek, in a script that we term Linear B (after Evans). This script is completely unrelated to the later Greek alphabet (there was a Dark Age between the fall of the Mycenaean palaces in the 13th-12th C BC and the advent of the Greek alphabet in the 8th C BC). It is sometimes difficult to read, and being a syllabic script of the open syllable sort, it is not well suited to writing Greek. The subject matter is also rather dry, mostly recording inventories of various goods, and the duties owed to the palace by personnel. So we already have some interpretive problems with the historical documents of the Mycenaean period.
But who was writing the documents? For a long time, it was thought that writing must have been restricted to a scribal class of the Egyptian sort. Meanwhile, some scholars have had a tendency to argue that the surviving clay tablets do not represent the full extent of Mycenaean literacy - because they believe a wider pool of people were writing, but were doing it on 'perishable materials' (e.g. papyrus). If that were the case however, it is astonishing that we do not have traces of low register inscriptions like graffiti. There is almost nothing that does not have a very obvious economic and administrative context.
So, nowadays, the consensus - or at least the consensus that I ascribe to myself (while there are still some scholars who believe in the perishable materials) - is that the clay tablets were written not by scribes as such but by literate administrators, who would go around recording the goods and services they were overseeing in some capacity. Some of these may have been administrators of considerable standing (e.g. Hands 1 and 2 at Pylos). They would still be highly trained in the use of the script, which in itself was an administrative tool. And because the Linear B script required such a high degree of training (hundreds of signs to master, as opposed to our nice streamlined alphabet that we have today, along with lots of conventions about how to lay out information), it is not surprising that there is no evidence for it being used by anyone outside of this administrative context.
I'm going to stop there, but please poke me if you have questions about any of the material here, or if you want more references.