The Mycenaean World

By John Chadwick

Book Overview

In 1952 the decipherment of the Linear B script suddenly revealed the Greekness of Mycenaean Greece. Now, after new discoveries and more than 20 years of intensive work, scholars are able to interpret the written documents and reconstruct from them a vivid picture of life in this remote period, in a way which is impossible from archaeology alone. John Chadwick, who assisted Ventris in the original decipherment, has played a major part in these advances. He now summarizes the results of research and in so doing opens the door to a new world, Mycenaean Greece seen through the eyes of its inhabitants. The tablets may be only, as he describes them, 'the account books of anonymous clerks', but from these prosaic documents he shows how we can infer a bronze industry, foreign slave-women, or even human sacrifice. Not least important is the comparison of the newly available data with the Homeric account, much to the detriment of Homer's credibility as a witness.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521290376
• ISBN13: 9780521290371
• Release Date: March 1976
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 1.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.8" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Book

Arrived earlier than I expected and was very securely packaged so did not sustain any damage whatsoever.

Dry But Factual

This book is a little dry for a layman's tastes probably, but more than likely only the interested will purchase such a specialized title anyway. The reason for the "dryness"? This book is very conservative, making no convoluted deductions from the evidence, but is actually a concise survey of everything currently known about the mycenaeans (what types of info are preserved on the tablets, what crops and livestock were cultivated, what aspects of the administrative system is known, etc.). The writing style isn't dry, really, just to-the-point as it should be in such a work. Any deep studies of bronze-age Greece should start here.