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The Mycenaean palatial economy: Making the most of the gaps in the evidence1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Paul Halstead
Paul Halstead
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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It has long been recognised that the Linear B archives from the Mycenaean palaces of Late Bronze Age Greece document ‘a massive redistributive operation, in which all personnel and all activities, all movements of both persons and goods … were administratively fixed’. Goods, land and services were transferred within the extensive territory of each palace without the equivalences of value between commodities which are a prerequisite of market exchange. The transactions recorded in the Linear B archives are thus unambiguously ‘redistributive’, an Aegean variant of a form of exchange widespread in the ancient civilisations, and as such have attracted the interest both of economic historians and of prehistorians concerned with the development of complex society. The term ‘redistribution’ embraces a range of possible forms, however, and in the case of the Mycenaean palaces poses a number of questions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 38 , 1993 , pp. 57 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1993

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