Ke Ra Me Ja

The title of this volume, ke-ra-me-ja in Linear B, was chosen because it means ñpotterî (????????, from Greek ???????, ñpotterÍs clayî) and combines two major strands of Cynthia ShelmerdineÍs scholarship: Mycenaean ceramics and Linear B texts. It thereby signals her pioneering use of archaeological and textual data in a sophisticated and integrated way. The intellectual content of the essays demonstrate not only that her research has had wide-ranging influence, but also that it is a model of scholarship to be emulated.

Ke-ra-me-ja is a woman's name that appears on a Linear B tablet from Knossos. It means "potter" (Κεράμεια, from Greek κέραμος, "potter's clay") and combines two major strands of Cynthia Shelmerdine's scholarly pursuits: Mycenaean ceramics and Linear B texts. It thereby signals her pioneering use of archaeological and textual data in a sophisticated and integrated way. The intellectual content of the essays presented to her in this volume demonstrate not only that her research has had a wide-ranging influence, but also that it is a model of scholarship to be emulated.

In this second edition of Documents in Mycenaean Greek, Chadwick examines how the study of the subject has expanded since 1953.

The aim of this investigation is to determine the nature of the local case relations to be found in the Mycenaean texts, and the forms by means of which these case relations are expressed. Though much work has already been done in this field, a re-examination of the relevant words and expressions in their contexts may still be rewarding. To put the Mycenaean data in relief, the language of the Homeric epics will receive due attention, and occasionally also dialect inscriptions and post-Homeric literary sources, as need may be.

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.

This volume presents selected material associated with potters' workshops and pottery production from some 14 Early Iron Age contexts northwest of the Athenian Acropolis that range in date from the Protogeometric through Archaic periods. Located in the area that was to become the Agora of Classical Athens, these deposits establish that the place was used for industrial activity until it was formally transformed into the civic and commercial center of the city in the early 5th century B.C. The Early Iron Age potters' debris published in this volume sheds light on many aspects of pottery production, in prehistory as well as in the Classical and later periods. The material includes test-pieces, wasters and other production discards. There is also a reassessment of the evidence associated with the kiln underlying the later Tholos.

Ground-breaking analysis of the Linear B undeciphered signs shedding light on the writing system and the activities of its writers.

The actual progress in the study of social and economic structures of Late Bronze Age societies requires a general overview of the historical process in the area of the Eastern Mediterranean as a whole. This was the purpose of the symposium the proceedings of which are collected in the form of articles in the present volume. They are studies dealing with the Mycenaean world, with the Hittite Empire, Nuzi, Emar, Alalakh, Ugarit, the Pharaonic lands in the Izreel Valley. Particular attention is paid to the trade between the Aegean and the Levant, as well as to the Sea-Peoples. The proceedings give a comprehensive view of the social and economic historical process in the Eastern Mediterranean between 1500 and 1000 B.C. and constitute an important contribution to the study of this crucial period in the history of the Ancient Middle East.

This book traces the development of Greek from Proto-Indo-European to around the 5th century BC, drawing on all the tools of scientific historical and comparative linguistics. Don Ringe begins by outlining the grammar of Proto-Indo-European, focusing on its complex phonology, phonological rules, and inflectional morphology. He then discusses the changes in both phonology and inflectional morphology that took place in the development of Greek up to the point at which the dialects began to diverge, seeking to establish chronological relationships between those changes. The book places particular emphasis on the diversification of Greek into the attested groups of dialects, the relationship between those dialects, and the extent to which innovations spread across dialect boundaries. The final two chapters cover syntactic changes in the prehistory and history of Ancient Greek, and the sources of the Ancient Greek lexicon. The volume contributes to long-standing debates surrounding the classification of Ancient Greek dialects, and offers a discussion of the tension between cladistics and contact phenomena that is relevant to the study of the relationships within any language family.