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

Abstract

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.