Practice question · Multiple choice
Linear B tablets are almost entirely inventories, sheep, wheel-rims, rations. Why is that mundane content so informative about Mycenaean palaces?
Hints
- Ask what an institution keeping those records must have been doing all day.
- Nothing was written down that the palace did not need to track.
Show the answer
C. Because accounting on that scale reveals a redistributive economy
Why
What a bureaucracy counts tells you what it controls. Literacy here is an administrative tool, which is also why it vanished entirely when the palaces burned.
Practise The Bronze Age Aegean
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More questions on The Bronze Age Aegean
- What makes the systems-collapse thesis persuasive?
- The Greek alphabet spread quickly into non-administrative use partly because it belonged to no institution.
- Sort each factor in the 1200 BCE collapse.
- The Sea Peoples are best understood as the cause of the Late Bronze Age collapse.
- Complete the argument.
- Why was Ventris’s decipherment of Linear B as GREEK such a shock?
- Linear B tablets survive because a palace burned down. What does that accident tell us about what we can know?