A survey of evidence for feasting in Mycenaean Society

Hesperia, Spring, 2004 by James C. Wright

The ideograms on these tablets relied on shorthand for noting items. For the archaeologist who collects artifacts from domestic and funerary contexts, a disjuncture exists between the Linear B ideograms and the range of objects known to us. The ideograms for vessels do not lend themselves to a literal reading as they were strongly modified by textual description and vary both in execution and type. (69) How, then, can we relate them to the many artifacts we find in the palaces and tombs? Here we face the classic problem of trying to read the ideograms as markers within our own system of transcription and translation, instead of attempting to understand how they were used by the scribes to signify meaning to themselves and to other scribes. (70) It is clear that the addition of Linear B signs within certain ideograms (e.g., *202, see Fig. 7) modifies their meaning, (71) and we know from texts where the vessel form has been written out, e.g., PY Ta 641 and 709, that the ideogram in some instances needs supplementing with words to convey a more specific meaning. (72) This is a significant scribal convention in that it allows us to recognize that the standard set of ideograms was too small to represent all the cognitive types of vessels employed in the palace--a classic problem of typology without taxonomy. (73) Matthaus, in categorizing the corpus of bronze vessels from Bronze Age Greece, created a typology with a bewildering array of types and variants according to form, shape, size, and decorative and functional aspects--a classification much greater than what one sees represented on painted pottery or in frescoes and ideograms, a scheme that leads the contemporary analyst to despair when attempting to determine functional and symbolic relationships. (74) Similarly, no scribe in antiquity could have worked with such a typology, for every variation in the objects could never be registered in bureaucratic discourse. Nevertheless, the ancient scribes at Pylos and Knossos had to account for each vessel, and they devised ways of adding description to the ideograms that accounted for the variation and enabled them to refer to specific vessels.

This digression concerns an important issue of method. As Matthaus recognized, we are obligated when studying preserved metal vessels, and in some instances ceramic ones, to relate them to texts discussing those vessels. (75) To recover meaning from the texts, we must learn to read them, not merely translate them, and, in the structuralist sense, acknowledge the iconographic tradition that underlies the ideograms. This iconography informs other modes of representation: painted vessels in frescoes, painted vessels on vessels, and depictions of vessels in use. While there is no one-toone correspondence between actual vessels and their ideogrammatic representation, a relatively consistent usage among different forms of representation may inform us as to what the Mycenaeans were saying about feasting through such depictions.