Thebes tablets - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Thebes tablets are clay tablets discovered at the city of Thebes, Greece

Thebes, Greece

Thebes is a city in Greece, situated to the north of the Cithaeron range, which divides Boeotia from Attica, and on the southern edge of the Boeotian plain. It played an important role in Greek myth, as the site of the stories of Cadmus, Oedipus, Dionysus and others...

, with inscriptions in the Mycenaean Greek language in the Linear B

Linear B

Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It pre-dated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization...

script. They belong to the Late Helladic IIIB

Helladic period

Helladic is a modern archaeological term meant to identify a sequence of periods characterizing the culture of mainland ancient Greece during the Bronze Age. The term is commonly used in archaeology and art history...

context, contemporary with the finds at Pylos

Pylos

Pylos , historically known under its Italian name Navarino, is a town and a former municipality in Messenia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Pylos-Nestoras, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit. It was the capital of the former...

. A first group of 21 fragments were found in the 1963–64 campaign; a further nineteen tablets were found in 1970 and 1972. Using Near Eastern cylinder seals associated with the finds, the editors of the published corpus of the whole archive now date the destruction of the Kadmeion, the Mycenaean palace complex at Thebes, and therefore the writing of the tablets, some of which were still damp when they were unintentionally fired, to a time not long after 1225 BC. Chadwick identified three recognizable Hellenic divinities, Hera

Hera

Hera was the wife and one of three sisters of Zeus in the Olympian pantheon of Greek mythology and religion. Her chief function was as the goddess of women and marriage. Her counterpart in the religion of ancient Rome was Juno. The cow and the peacock were sacred to her...

, Hermes

Hermes

Hermes is the great messenger of the gods in Greek mythology and a guide to the Underworld. Hermes was born on Mount Kyllini in Arcadia. An Olympian god, he is also the patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of the cunning of thieves, of orators and...

and Potnia

Potnia

Potnia , Ancient Greek for "Mistress, Lady", title of a goddess. The word was inherited by Classical Greek from Mycenean Greek with the same meaning and it was applied to several goddesses. A similar word is the title Despoina, "the mistress", which was given to the nameless chthonian goddess of...

"the mistress", among the recipients of wool. He made out a case for ko-ma-we-te-ja, also attested at Pylos, as the name of a goddess.

Quite early, before the more recent discoveries, F.M. Ahl made the provocative suggestion concerning the phoinikeia grammata, the "Phoenician" or the "palm-leaf" (phoinix) letters: "Cadmus

Cadmus

Cadmus or Kadmos , in Greek mythology was a Phoenician prince, the son of king Agenor and queen Telephassa of Tyre and the brother of Phoenix, Cilix and Europa. He was originally sent by his royal parents to seek out and escort his sister Europa back to Tyre after she was abducted from the shores...

did bring writing to Thebes, but this writing was not the Phoenician alphabet, but Linear B".

Discovery

A substantial additional portion, some 250 tablets, amounting roughly to 5% of the entire Mycenaean corpus from all sites, was discovered in Pelopidou Street and the "Arsenal" by Vassilis L. Aravantinos, the current archaeological superintendent of Thebes, from 1993 to 1995, in a rescue excavation. In 1996, a few more tablets were identified in a museum among finds from the 1963–64 dig in Thebes.

The number of 'tablets' given by the editors is actually misleading. For example, as Tom Palaima and Sarah James have independently demonstrated, the '123 tablets' of the Fq series actually are many fragments of texts that originally made up between fifteen and eighteen tablets at the most.

Publication

The French and Italian linguists Louis Godart

Louis Godart

Louis Godart is an Italian archaeologist of Belgian origins. He is a specialist in Mycenaean archaeology and philology and holds the chair of philology at the University of Naples Federico II...

and Anna Sacconi were charged with the publication of these tablets. During the following years, their tantalizing glimpses of the contents resulted in impatient accusations; when the tablets were finally published in 2001, the impact of their overall content was perceived by most reviewers to be rather less than expected.

Findings

Many of the Thebes tablets can be read as containing information on divinities and religious rites; others mention quantities of various commodities. By the sites mentioned, the boundaries of the region controlled by the Theban palace can be estimated: the Theban palace controlled the island of Euboia and had a harbour in Aulis

Aulis

Aulis may refer to:* Aulis, , an ancient Greek town in Boeotia, and traditionally the port from which the Greek army set sail for the Trojan War.* Aulis, a daughter of King Ogyges and Thebe*Aulis, a genus of ladybird beetle...

. The tablets contain a number of important terms previously unattested in Linear B, such as ra-ke-da-mi-ni-jo /Lakedaimnijos/ "a man from Lacedaemonia

Lacedaemonia

Lacedaemonia may mean:*Laconia, a modern prefecture of Greece*The ancient region of Greece of the same name; see Laconia *Lacedaemonia, the name borne by the city of Sparta from Late Antiquity to the 19th century....

(Sparta

Sparta

Sparta or Lacedaemon, was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece, situated on the banks of the River Eurotas in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. It emerged as a political entity around the 10th century BC, when the invading Dorians subjugated the local, non-Dorian population. From c...

)", or ma-ka /Mā Gā/ "Mother Gaia

Gaia (mythology)

Gaia was the primordial Earth-goddess in ancient Greek religion. Gaia was the great mother of all: the heavenly gods and Titans were descended from her union with Uranus , the sea-gods from her union with Pontus , the Giants from her mating with Tartarus and mortal creatures were sprung or born...

" (a goddess still revered in Thebes in the 5th century BC, as reported e.g. in Aeschylus

Aeschylus

Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived, the others being Sophocles and Euripides, and is often described as the father of tragedy. His name derives from the Greek word aiskhos , meaning "shame"...

' Seven Against Thebes
Seven Against Thebes
The Seven against Thebes is the third play in an Oedipus-themed trilogy produced by Aeschylus in 467 BC. The trilogy is sometimes referred to as the Oedipodea. It concerns the battle between an Argive army led by Polynices and the army of Thebes led by Eteocles and his supporters. The trilogy won...

). Interesting is also ku-na-ki-si /gunaiksi/ "for women", exhibiting the peculiar oblique stem of Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

"woman".

Godart and Sacconi read the tablets to indicate cult activity dedicated to Demeter

Demeter

In Greek mythology, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest, who presided over grains, the fertility of the earth, and the seasons . Her common surnames are Sito as the giver of food or corn/grain and Thesmophoros as a mark of the civilized existence of agricultural society...

, Zeus

Zeus

In the ancient Greek religion, Zeus was the "Father of Gods and men" who ruled the Olympians of Mount Olympus as a father ruled the family. He was the god of sky and thunder in Greek mythology. His Roman counterpart is Jupiter and his Etruscan counterpart is Tinia.Zeus was the child of Cronus...

protector of crops, and to Kore

Persephone

In Greek mythology, Persephone , also called Kore , is the daughter of Zeus and the harvest-goddess Demeter, and queen of the underworld; she was abducted by Hades, the god-king of the underworld....

, and they speculate that the roots of the Eleusinian Mysteries

Eleusinian Mysteries

The Eleusinian Mysteries were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in ancient Greece. Of all the mysteries celebrated in ancient times, these were held to be the ones of greatest importance...

can be traced back to Mycenaean Thebes. Palaima, however, has criticized their suggestions as "subject to very dubious interpretations" and "highly suspect on linguistic and exegetical grounds". Other arguments against the identification of cult activity in the texts have been advanced by Sarah James and Yves Duhoux.

Palaima does attach importance to one tablet (Uo 121) as evidence of linking sacrificial animals with foodstuffs at the end of LHIIIB. The same phenomenon, part of ritual Mycenaean feasting, occurs in the contemporary Pylos

Pylos

tablets.

2002 Vienna symposium

The results of a specialist symposium held in Vienna December 5–6, 2002 have been published. These papers further dismantle the "house of cards" constructed by the editors of the tablets concerning religious references in the Thebes tablets.

Günter Neumann (pp. 125–138) demonstrates clearly that the animals in the Thebes tablets are not in any way sacred or 'divine', but are animals that would naturally be part of everyday life for Mycenaean and later Greeks. He gathers the explicit historical evidence for this, including references to these animals being fed grains.

Michael Meier-Brügger (pp. 111–118) clearly demonstrates that de-qo-no as "master of banqueting" is linguistically impossible. It must be deipnon "main dinner' as in Homer; that di-wi-ja-me-ro cannot equal 'the part for the goddess Diwia' but has to be 'two-day period' (as also argued earlier by Melena and in this volume by Killen); that si-to is not an otherwise unattested god Sito (Grain) but plain siton "grain".

José Luis Garcia Ramón (pp. 37–69) demonstrates that linguistically a-ko-ro-da-mo cannot signify agorodamos 'mystic assembler of the people'. He proposes the simple Greek man's name Akrodamos. He also sees that o-po-re-i is a personal name parallel to another in these Thebes texts me-to-re-i. They mean respectively "On the mountain" and "Beyond the mountain." So o-po-re-i does not mean "Zeus of the Fall Harvest", which is impossible according to Mycenaean usage for god's names and epithets.

John T. Killen (pp. 79–110) specifically concludes (p. 103): "...the fact that ma-ka, o-po-re-i, and ko-wa never all occur together, and that it requires a special hypothesis to explain this fact, combined with what I believe are the continuing difficulties with explaining o-po-re-i as a theonym /Opo:rehi/, make me reluctant for the present to accept the ma-ka = Ma:i Ga:i [i.e., Mother Earth] equation."

Discovery

Publication

Findings

2002 Vienna symposium

Further reading