Chapter 9: Finds In A Mycenaean Context

It was as he was sitting by the pool thinking about his forthcoming delivery that Bethany hailed him from the road. "Exciting news," she called. "we thought you'd want to know."

Excitement was just what Freddie could do without right now but he followed Bethany down to the site.

"This could be just the thing we were looking for." Bethany was sounding as excited as Danni had on his first visit.

The first trench had been extended back beyond the perimeter wall and, sure enough, as the radar survey had predicted they had found a series of small rooms. Bethany pointed to pile of dark red dirt. Stacey sat grinning beside it. "There was a fire here," she said, and best of all we've found some clay tablets. She picked up a plastic box and opened the top. Inside were four small sticks of reddish clay. "Linear B," she said pointing to the incised characters on the tablets.

Freddie looked puzzled. "Not Greek?" he said.

"No," said Bethany patiently. "This is from 500 years before the Greeks, the Bronze Age. The Mycenaeans seem to have spoken a form of Greek but their writing was quite different. It was only in the 1950's that archaeologists could even start to read it and it still isn't fully deciphered. We can read quite a lot of it though. The trouble is most of it is usually just tallies; so many jars of olives, so many sheep, so many chariots and so on."

"Not great literature, then?"

"No sadly. Of course there are always the lunatics who think they'll turn up some precursor of Homer, or an eye-witness account of the Ark Of The Covenant or even the last will and testament of King Priam but I think that shows a mis-understanding of the Mycenaen mind. Poetry was spoken and shared. What point would there be in writing it down? Keeping track of the number of sheep or how much oil you had, well that's a different matter!"

Freddie had some sympathy with her point of view. He'd always felt it was a good idea to keep track of your assets.

Bethany carried on. "We've got a phenomenally rich picture of the economy of Mycenean society as a result but it's a bit as though archaeologists had dug up the archives of tax returns at the Inland Revenue. They wouldn't know whether or not Shakespeare's plays existed."

"Though they might find some great works of fiction," Freddie smiled.

"True. These four tablets are much the same as others but in the context we have them they are intriguing."

"How come?"

"Well, I'm not an expert but these are well preserved — baked in this fire — and easy to read. Each of them starts with a different word that we can't translate. That's not unusual - there are lots of words that we can't translate because they don't fit with later Greek words. As they are here though they look suspiciously like names. There's this untranslatable word then the signs for a woman slave — 'do-e-ra' and then there's a number". So this one says 'name, women, four" and this one 'name, women, five" and this one 'name, women, three'. This last one has the same name again but with six women."

"Well you said you were looking for a slave market — it looks like you found the accounts books."

"We can't be that hasty just on the basis of the tablets but there are other finds that point that way too. Look in this room." Bethany pointed over the wall at a dark green mass of material clinging to the side of the wall.

"Metal?"

"Bronze."

"You said it was Bronze Age. Hardly surprising."

"No but this is interesting. It's a ring set into the wall. There's one on each of these small rooms or cells."

"That sounds like you're naming things to suit your prejudice. Are you sure you're not harking back to Great, Great, Uncle Arthur?"

"Well, maybe. But there's more evidence here." Bethany led the way across to the other trench. Danni was finishing work on the fallen part of the column which now looked to have been about six feet high. It was only as she moved away from it that Freddie could see that the top of the column had been fashioned in the image of a massive phallus and that there were bronze rings fitted to the column just below where the head of the phallus began to bulge out. "It doesn't take too much imagination to make this into a slave market. Put a poor Mycenaean slave girl chained against that pillar in the middle of this arena; the slave seller standing on this podium; the buyers ranged on seats above the perimeter wall; other slave girls brought out from the cells beneath the seating and paraded around in front of the buyers."

"Well it's plausible to me as a layman. I couldn't say what an academic would make of it."

"Nor me," Bethany giggled. "But the folks at the Discovery Channel will love it."

Freddie could bet that they would. It was always interesting to note how much approbation was heaped on activities like these but how much time the prurient media invested in analysing and "exposing" such activities. He couldn't help but feel it was all a bit hypocritical

"So is that it then?"

"Goodness no, this is a major find. We'll want to survey the other side, over there towards the headland." Bethany pointed ominously to the cliffs that hid Freddie's own slave accommodation. "Discovery Channel will want to send a proper team out here rather than relying on our hand-held camera work. Maybe the National Museum in Athens will want to send a team. We have to let them know what we've found and see what they want to do. That's why Norah's going back on the ferry tonight. You must know what the communications are like from here. It's better for her to do it from over there. We've put together a collection of photographs, some video footage and casts of the tablets. She'll take those and go and talk to the people at the Ministry of Culture and we'll see what happens next."