Please watch the following videoof a talk by Prof. Dimitri Nakassis, professor of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Colorado.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKDCgmMYUp8 (Links to an external site.) (Links to an external site.)
You only need to watch from 3:41 to 36:20.
Read this extra information:
I need to fill you in a little more about what kind of things are on the Linear B tablets that have been deciphered: they are mainly inventory records from the Mycenaean palaces, written in a form of Greek, listing and describing the contents of storage rooms, but also about materials from different places coming in from outside the palace, or about materials going out to various places or people. Taxes are mentioned sometimes and also disputes about ownership. As you’ll see, some of the first readers of these tablets, particularly Moses Finley, concluded that this was a highly regulated and bureaucratic society, and use the terms “palace economy”, “redistributive economy”, “centralized economy”. But now these conclusions and hypotheses are being re-examined by others, including Prof. Nakassis, who claims that at Pylos (one of the palace sites) the palace controlled less than 10% of the economy and owned only about 6% of the land.
Then answer the following questions:
1. Before the decipherment in 1952 of Linear B tablets found in Mycenaean palaces, how did some scholars (e.g. the Greek historian Tsountas, writing in the 1890s) see the Mycenaeans in relation to later Greek cultures (like the Greeks of the Classical period)? Did they see them as Greeks? How else did they describe them, what groups did they include them in?
2.After 1952, when the Linear B tablets began to be deciphered and it was realized that the Mycenaeans spoke an early form of Greek, what has been the dominant way of regarding the relationship between the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans and the Greeks of later periods? How have historians tended to characterize the connection between them? Give some examples and quotations from the video.
When some historians apply the term “orientalizing” to the Mycenaean culture, what do they mean by this? What characteristics and kind of society do they associate with “oriental” or Near Eastern cultures of this period? What do they contrast with this, what do they see as characteristic of “Greek” culture? Give some examples and quotations from the video. (There is a helpful graphic that Nakassis shows at one point during his presentation that helps summarize this point and which you could explain or expand on.)
