The
Thebes tablets are clay tablets discovered at the city of
Thebes, Greece, with inscriptions in the
Mycenaean language in the
Linear B script. They belong to the
Late Helladic IIIB context, contemporary with the finds at
Pylos. A first group of 21 fragments were found in the 1963-4 campaign;
[1] a further nineteen tablets were found in 1970 and 1972.
[2] Using Near Eastern cylinder seals associated with the finds, the editors of the published corpus of the whole archive now date the destruction of the
Kadmeion, the Mycenaean palace complex at Thebes, and therefore the writing of the tablets, some of which were still damp when they were unintentionally fired, to a time not long after 1225 BC. Chadwick identified three recognizable Hellenic divinities,
Hera,
Hermes and
Potnia "the mistress", among the recipients of wool. He made out a case for
ko-ma-we-te-ja, aloso attested at
Pylos, as the name of a goddess.
Quite early, before the more recent discoveries, F.M. Ahl made the astute observation of the
phoinikeia grammata, the "Phoenician" or the "palm-leaf" (
phoinix) letters: "
Cadmus did bring writing to Thebes, but this writing was not the Phoenician alphabet, but Linear B".
[3]
Discovery
A substantial addition portion, some 250 tablets, amounting roughly to 5% of the entire Mycenaean corpus from all sites, was discovered in Pelopidou Street and the "Arsenal" by Vassilis L. Aravantinos, the current archaeological superintendent of Thebes, from 1993 to 1995, in a rescue excavation. In 1996 a few more tablets were identified in a museum among finds from the 1963-64 dig in Thebes.
The number of tablets given by the editors is actually misleading. For example, as Tom Palaima and Sarah James have independently demonstrated, the '123 tablets' of the Fq series) actually are many fragments of texts that originally made up between fifteen and eighteen tablets at the most.
Publication
The French and Italian linguists Louis Godart and Anna Sacconi were charged with the publication of these tablets. During the following years, their tantalizing glimpses of the contents resulted in impatient accusations; when the tablets were finally published in 2001,
[4] the impact of their overall content was perceived by most reviewers to be rather less than expected.
Findings
Many of the Thebes tablets can be read as containing information on divinities and religious rites; others mention quantities of various commodities. By the sites mentioned, the boundaries of the region controlled by the Theban palace can be estimated: the Theban palace controlled the island of
Euboia and had a harbour in
Aulis. The tablets contain a number of important terms previously unattested in Linear B, such as
ra-ke-da-mi-ni-jo /Lakedaimnijos/ "a man from
Lacedaemonia (
Sparta)", or
ma-ka /Mā Gā/ "Mother
Gaia" (a goddess still revered in Thebes in the
5th century BC, as reported e.g. in
Aeschylus'
Seven Against Thebes). Interesting is also
ku-na-ki-si /gunaiksi/ "for women", exhibiting the peculiar oblique stem of
Greek γυνή "woman".
Godart and Sacconi read the tablets to indicate cult activity dedicated to
Demeter,
Zeus protector of crops, and to
Kore, and they speculate that the roots of the
Eleusinian Mysteries can be traced back to Mycenaean Thebes. Palaima, however, has lambasted their suggestions as "subject to very dubious interpretations" and "highly suspect on linguistic and exegetical grounds".
[5] Other arguments against the identification of cult activity in the texts have been advanced by Sarah James and Yves Duhoux.
Palaima does attach importance to one tablet (Uo 121) as evidence of linking sacrificial animals with foodstuffs at the end of LHIIIB. The same phenomenon, part of ritual Mycenaean feasting, occurs in the contemporary
Pylos tablets.
The Vienna symposium, 2002
The results of a specialist symposium held in Vienna December 5-6, 2002 have now been published.
[6] These papers further dismantle the "house of cards" constructed by the editors of the tablets concerning religious references in the Thebes tablets.
Günter Neumann (pp. 125-138) demonstrates clearly that the animals in the Thebes tablets are not in any way sacred or 'divine', but are animals that would naturally be part of everyday life for Mycenaean and later Greeks. He gathers the explicit historical evidence for this, including references to these animals being fed grains.
Michael Meier-Brügger (pp. 111-118) clearly demonstrates that
de-qo-no as "master of banqueting" is linguistically impossible. It must be
deipnon "main dinner' as in Homer; that
di-wi-ja-me-ro cannot equal "the part for the goddess Diwia' but has to be 'two-day period' (as also argued earlier by Melena and in this volume by Killen); that
si-to is not an otherwise unattested god Sito (Grain) but plain
siton "grain".
José Luis Garcia Ramón (pp. 37-69) demonstrates that linguistically
a-ko-ro-da-mo cannot signify
agorodamos 'mystic assembler of the people'. He proposes the simple Greek man's name Akrodamos. He also sees that
o-po-re-i is a personal name parallel to another in these Thebes texts
me-to-re-i. They mean respectively "On the mountain" and "Beyond the mountain." So
o-po-re-i does not mean "Zeus of the Fall Harvest", which is impossible according to Mycenaean usage for god's names and epithets.
John T. Killen (pp. 79-110) specifically concludes (p.103): "...the fact that ma-ka, o-po-re-i, and ko-wa never all occur together, and that it requires a special hypothesis to explain this fact, combined with what I believe are the continuing difficulties with explaining o-po-re-i as a theonym /Opo:rehi/, make me reluctant for the present to accept the ma-ka = Ma:i Ga:i [i.e., Mother Earth] equation."
Notes
1.
^ They were published by
John Chadwick in
Minos 10 1970:115-37
2.
^ Theodoros G. Spyropoulos and John Chadwick,
The Thebes Tablets II (Salamanca: Universitad de Salamanca) 1975.
3.
^ Ahl, "Cadmus and the Palm-Leaf Tablets"
The American Journal of Philology 88.2 (April 1967, pp. 188-194) p. 188.
4.
^ V. Aravantinos,L. Godart and A. Sacconi,
Thèbes: Fouilles de la Cadmée I (Pisa/Rome) 2001.
5.
^ Palaima, "Sacrifical Feasting" p. 218, citing his own reviews "Rev. of Aravantinos, Godart, and Sacconi 2001", in
Minos 35–36, pp. 475–486; review of Aravantinos, Godart, and Sacconi 2001, in
AJA 107, pp. 113–115.
6.
^ S. Deger-Jalkotzy and O. Panagl,
Die Neuen Linear B-Texte aus Theben (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 2006);
On-line abstract.
Further reading
- V. L. Aravantinos, L. Godart, A. Sacconi, Thèbes: Fouilles de la Cadmée I: Les tablettes en Linéaire B de la Odos Pelopidou: Édition et commentaire. Pisa and Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 2001. ISBN 88-8147-228-7.
- V. L. Aravantinos, L. Godart, A. Sacconi, A. Sacconi, Thèbes: Fouilles de la Cadmée III: Corpus des documents d'archives en linéaire B de Thèbes (1-433). Pisa and Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 2002 ISBN 88-8147-354-2 ISBN 88-8147-301-1
- V. L. Aravantinos, M. del Freo, L. Godart, Thèbes: Fouilles de la Cadmée IV: Les textes de Thèbes (1-433): Translitération et tableaux des scribes. Pisa and Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 2005. ISBN 88-8147-421-2 ISBN 88-8147-434-4
- Bryn Mawr Classics Review 20: review of all three volumes, 2005.
- Duhoux, Yves, "Dieux ou humains? Qui sont "ma-ka", "o-po-re-i" et "ko-wa" dans les tablettes linéaire B de Thèbes," Minos 37-38 (2002-2003 [2006]), 173-254.
- S.A. James, "The Thebes Tablets and the Fq series: A Contextual Analysis," Minos 37-38 (2002-2003 [2006]), 397-418.
- S. Deger-Jalkotzy and O. Panagl, Die Neuen Linear B-Texte aus Theben (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 2006).
ISBN 978-3-7001-3640-8
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History of the
Greek language
(see also: Greek alphabet)
Proto-Greek (c. 2000 BC)
Mycenaean (c. 1600–1100 BC)
Ancient Greek (c.
..... Click the link for more information. Linear BUnicode range U+10000–U+1007F syllabic signs
U+10080–U+100FF logograms
ISO 15924
LinbNote: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
This article is about the ancient syllabary.
..... Click the link for more information. Helladic is a modern term of archaeological origin to identify a sequence of periods characterizing the culture of mainland ancient Greece during the Bronze Age. The term is commonly used in archaeology and art history.
..... Click the link for more information.
Coordinates
Coordinates: Time zone: EET/EEST (UTC+2/3)
Elevation (center): 3 m (0 ft)
GovernmentCountry: Greece..... Click the link for more information. In the Olympian pantheon of classical Greek Mythology, Hera, (Greek Ήρα, IPA pronunciation [ˈhiːrə]; or Here (
..... Click the link for more information.
Hermes (Greek, Ἑρμῆς, IPA: /ˈhɝmiːz/), in Greek mythology, is the Olympian god of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and
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Potnia (PIE *potnih2, Sanskrit
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Coordinates
Coordinates: Time zone: EET/EEST (UTC+2/3)
Elevation (center): 3 m (0 ft)
GovernmentCountry: Greece..... Click the link for more information. Cadmus, or Kadmos (Greek: Κάδμος), in Greek mythology, was the son of Agenor and the brother of Phoenix, Cilix and Europa. He is the grandfather of the Greek god Dionysus, through his daughter Semele.
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Euboea, or Negropont or Negroponte (Modern Greek: Εύβοια Évia, Ancient Greek Εὔβοια Eúboia
..... Click the link for more information.
Aulis may be:
- in Greek mythology, Aulis was both
- a daughter of King Ogyges and Thebe, and
- a port in Boeotia where the Greek navy rallied before setting off against Troy
..... Click the link for more information. Laconia (Λακωνία), also known as Lacedaemonia, is a prefecture in Greece. Laconia has the legal status of a prefecture, with Sparta its administrative capital.
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Sparta (Doric: Σπάρτᾱ Spártā, Attic: Σπάρτη Spártē
..... Click the link for more information.
For other uses, see Gaia.
Gaia (pronounced /
'geɪ.ə/ or /
'gaɪ...... Click the link for more information. The 5th century BC started the first day of 500 BC and ended the last day of 401 BC.
Overview
This century sees the beginning of a period of philosophical brilliance among advanced civilizations, particularly the Greeks which would continue all the way through the
..... Click the link for more information. Aeschylus (Greek: Αἰσχύλος, IPA: /ˈɛskələs/ or
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Seven against Thebes
The Oath of the Seven Chiefs by Alfred Church
Written by Aeschylus
Chorus Theban Women
Characters Eteocles
Spy
Antigone
Ismene
Herald
Setting Citadel of Thebes
The Seven against Thebes
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Greek}}}
Writing system: Greek alphabet
Official status
Official language of: Greece
Cyprus
European Union
recognised as minority language in parts of:
European Union
Italy
Turkey
Regulated by:
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Dêmêtêr /də'miː.tɚ/ (Greek: Δημήτηρ
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Zeus (in Greek: nominative: Ζεύς Zeús, genitive: Διός Diós
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Kore may refer to:
- the Greek goddess Persephone
- Kore (moon), a natural satellite of Jupiter named after her
- Kore (Esperanto) - An Esperanto word and the name of an Esperanto music group
- Kore (energy drink)
- Kore (sculpture), a type of sculpture
..... Click the link for more information. The Eleusinian Mysteries (Greek: Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια) were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in ancient Greece.
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Coordinates
Coordinates: Time zone: EET/EEST (UTC+2/3)
Elevation (center): 3 m (0 ft)
GovernmentCountry: Greece..... Click the link for more information. John Chadwick (21 May 1920 – 24 November 1998) was an English linguist and classical scholar most famous for his role in deciphering Linear B, along with Michael Ventris.
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