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This book revises our understanding of Mycenaean society through a detailed prosopographical analysis of individuals attested in the administrative texts from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos in southwestern Greece, ca. 1200 BC.

Understanding Relations Between Scripts examines the writing systems of the ancient Aegean and Cyprus in the second and first millennia BC, principally Cretan ‘Hieroglyphic’, Linear A, Linear B, Cypro-Minoan and the Cypriot Syllabary. These scripts, of which some are deciphered and others are not, are known to be related to each other. However, the details of their relationships with each other have remained poorly understood and this will be the first volume dedicated solely to this issue. Nine papers aim to reach a better appreciation of relationships between writing systems than has been possible in previous research, through an interdisciplinary dialogue that takes account of both features of the writing systems and the contextual factors affecting the way in which writing was passed on. Each individual contribution furthers this aim by presenting the latest research on the Aegean scripts, demonstrating the great advances in our understanding of script relations that are possible through such detailed and innovative studies.

The years c. 1250 to 1150 BC in Greece and the Aegean are often characterised as a time of crisis and collapse. A critical period in the long history of the region and its people and culture, they witnessed the end of the Mycenaean kingdoms, with their palaces and Linear B records, and, through the Postpalatial period, the transition into the Early Iron Age. But, on closer examination, it has become increasingly clear that the period as a whole, across the region, defies simple characterisation – there was success and splendour, resilience and continuity, and novelty and innovation, actively driven by the people of these lands through this transformative century. The story of the Aegean at this time has frequently been incorporated into narratives focused on the wider eastern Mediterranean, and most infamously the ‘Sea Peoples’ of the Egyptian texts. In twenty-five chapters written by 25 specialists, Collapse and Transformation instead offers a tight focus on the Aegean itself, providing an up-to date picture of the archaeology ‘before’ and ‘after’ ‘the collapse’ of c. 1200 BC. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean regions, as well as providing data and a range of interpretations to those studying collapse and resilience more widely and engaging in comparative studies. Introductory chapters discuss notions of collapse, and provide overviews of the Minoan and Mycenaean collapses. These are followed by twelve chapters, which review the evidence from the major regions of the Aegean, including the Argolid, Messenia, and Boeotia, Crete, and the Aegean islands. Six chapters then address key themes: the economy, funerary practices, the Mycenaean pottery of the mainland and the wider Aegean and eastern Mediterranean region, religion, and the extent to which later Greek myth can be drawn upon as evidence or taken to reflect any historical reality. The final four chapters provide a wider context for the Aegean story, surveying the eastern Mediterranean, including Cyprus and the Levant, and the themes of subsistence and warfare.

This study investigates the properties of several ancient syllabic and linear segmental scripts to make explicit the aspects of linguistic knowledge they attempt to represent. Some recent experimental work suggests that nonliterate speakers do not have segmental knowledge and that only syllabic knowledge is 'real' or accessible, whence the ubiquity of syllabaries. Miller disputes this by showing that such tests do not distinguish relevant types of knowledge, and that linguistic analysis of the ordering and writing conventions of early Western scripts corroborates the evidence from language acquisition, use, and change for segment awareness. By coding segments, the ancient syllabaries represented more phonological knowledge than the alphabet, which was a poor compromise between the vowelless West Semitic scripts and the vowel-redundant syllabic scripts.A wide range of information about early scripts and their development is combined with a new theory of the syllable as 'Sonority Phrase'. The book's value is further enhanced by thorough discussion of the issues from a broad range of theoretical and applied viewpoints, including language play and change, cognition, literacy, and cultural history.

This pioneering volume approaches the languages and scripts of ancient Cyprus from an interdisciplinary point of view, with a primarily linguistic and epigraphic approach supplemented by a consideration of their historical and cultural context. The focus is on furthering our knowledge of the non-Greek languages/scripts, as well as appreciating their place in relation to the much better understood Greek language on the island. Following on from recent advances in Cypro-Minoan studies, these difficult, mostly Late Bronze Age inscriptions are reassessed from first principles. The same approach is taken for non-Greek languages written in the Cypriot Syllabic script during the first millennium BC, chiefly the one usually referred to as Eteocypriot. The final section is then dedicated to the Phoenician language, which was in use on Cyprus for some hundreds of years. The result is a careful reappraisal of these languages/scripts after more than a century of sometimes controversial scholarship.

According to Herodotus, the expression phoinikeia grammata means ‘Phoenician letters’ and refers to the Phoenician origins of the Greek alphabet. This account has found general acceptance, but it is not the only interpretation possible and other theories circulated in antiquity. The adjective φοῖνιξ does not only mean ‘Phoenician’; it can also refer to a palm tree or the colour red. This article argues that the expression phoinikeia grammata did not originally refer to the alphabet, but to Linear B writing on palm leaves, as already suggested by Frederick Ahl. It is shown that the account of Herodotus is the result of a ‘learned reinterpretation’, triggered by the ambiguity of the word φοῖνιξ. The new understanding of phoinikeia grammata proposeds here has some important consequences: it implies that Linear B, as has long been suspected, was primarily written on palm leaves (hence ‘palm-leaf writing’) and that in classical antiquity there was at least a limited historical awareness of the existence of pre-alphabetic writing systems in the Aegean. This paper adduces additional evidence to substantiate these claims. Lastly, a case will be made that Herodotus’ incorrect reinterpretation has led to the ‘Phoenicianization’ of Cadmus, who was originally a Greek hero.