When Was That Christmas Star?

The star blazed and glittered “like the most beautiful and glorious torch ever seen when driven by a strong wind.”

Thus exclaimed Johannes Kepler when, on the night of 17 October 1604, he saw a brilliant new star shining in the heavens in the foot of the Constellation of the Serpent-Bearer (Ophiuchus).  That brightest of stars -- now known to have been a supernova -- is marked N in the lower centre of Kepler's sky chart (below).

The supernova appeared in the sky not long after a rare conjunction between the planets Jupiter and Saturn which, for the first time in 800 years, came together in one of the five fiery signs, in this case Sagittarius.  When Mars then moved closer to Jupiter, the planets and the supernova formed a heavenly triangle.  A fiery triangle within a fiery astrological sign. 

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was in Prague serving as Imperial Mathematician and court astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.  He charted the new star over the course of many months (except when it was too close to the sun to be seen by the naked eye), making his last observation a year later, after which the nova faded from view.  

Kepler believed that the new star was a portent, “an exceedingly wonderful work of God.” He also believed it was connected to astrological forces -- not the power of the zodiac, to be sure -- but  in a kind of dynamic force emanating from the sun that kept the planets in motion.  The planets, in turn,  exchanged this nebulous force among themselves -- rather like magnets attracting and repelling -- which is how other planets could influence events on earth.  In 1606, Kepler published De stella nova in Pede Serpentarii (On the New Star in the Foot of the Serpent-Bearer), arguing that there was a direct correlation between the new star and the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.  Such conjunctions were always potent signs for astrologers and thus, with the brilliant new star bursting onto the scene as well, it must have been especially charged with astrological significance.  Accordingly, Kepler predicted nothing less than the downfall of Islam and the return of Christ.

Yet his true Eureka! moment was not very far.



As a devout Lutheran, Kepler was deeply interested in Biblical chronology, not doubting, for example, that the earth had been created in 4,000 BC -- his starting point for calculations of heavenly movements throughout history.  Now, Kepler calculated that an equally rare  'greater conjunction', also later joined by Mars, had also taken place in the year 7 BC.  Surely, this conjunction was of the greatest astrological significance!  But what?  By remarkable chance, the Polish Jesuit historian, Laurentius Suslyga, had just published a tract which argued that the reckoning of the start of the Christian era (and thus all Anno Domini dates) was in error by four years.  Christ was born not in 1 AD but in 4 BC.  

Eureka!

For, if the author is correct, in order to reckon the Age of Christ, four years must be added to the Epoch of Christianity now in use  It would follow, therefore, that Christ was born one or two years after the great conjunction of the three superior Planets in the first part of Aries or in the end of Pisces, occurring for the sixth time since the foundation of the world.  Hence, the star which led the Magi to the manger of Christ, if it occurred two years before the birth of Christ, could be compared to our star.

The triple conjunction of the planets, thus, was the harbinger of the Star of Bethlehem just as, in his own day, an identical heavenly configuration had called forth Kepler's new star.  He assumed that his brilliant nova had the same relationship to the planetary conjunction in 1604 as had a portentous 'new star' in 7/6 BC, but that earlier star was the true Star of Bethlehem that led the Magi to the Christ child.

The Magi were of Chaldea, where was born astrology, of which this is a dictum: Great conjunctions of planets in cardinal points, especially in the equinoctial points of Aries and Libra,  signify a universal change of affairs; and a cometary star appearing at the same time tells of the rise of a king.... Granted, then, that the new star of the Magi was first seen not only at the same time as Saturn and Jupiter were beheld in each other's vicinity, namely in June BC 7, but also in the same part of the sky as the planets .... what else could the Chaldeans conclude from their, and the still existing, rules of their art [of astrology] but that some event of the greatest moment was imminent? 

Concerning the True Year in which the Son of God assumed a Human Nature in the Uterus of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Kepler published his work on chronology and the year of Jesus's birth in 1614: De Vero Anno quo Aeternus Dei Filius Humanam Naturam in Utero Benedictae Virginis Mariae Assumpsit (English title above).  In it Kepler demonstrated that the Christian calendar was in error by five years, and that Jesus had been born in 4 BC, a conclusion (as we are told by the authoritative Galileo Project) that is now universally accepted.* 

It had come about like this: Christ was conceived about the time that the major planets were in conjunction with the sun.  The Magi arrived in Jerusalem in February 5 BC to see for the second time (as recounted in Matthew 2,9-10) the star which they had seen for the first time in 7 BC (Matthew 2,2). 

What Wise Men Saw

The Star of Bethlehem could not have been the conjunction in and of itself.  No matter how close together two planets come, even if they eventually partially overlap, no Wise Man would mistake them for a single star.  While watching, he would have seen them coming together and, a few nights later, he'd see them separating.  Anyway, in 7 BC (as more recent and accurate reckoning has shown), Saturn and Jupiter never appeared to have approached each other more closely than a distance double that of the apparent diameter of the moon.  Worse still, while Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter did form a triangle in the sky towards the end of February 6 BC, Saturn and Mars, at least, were too close to the sun to be seen with the naked eye. By the time all three were visible in the morning sky, they had already moved apart considerably.


At The Fount of Astrology 

As it happens, Babylonian astrological records exist for the crucial year, four copies, in fact, of a so-called 'Almanac' covering the  Seleucid Era year 305 = 7/6 BC.   This means we have an extremely detailed set of observations and mathematical calculations for the prediction of astronomical movements from Babylonia -- a centre of astronomy and astrology in the Seleucid and Parthian periods -- which was also, according to some versions of the story, the home town of the journeying Magi.  In short, these cuneiform records were written at the right time and in the right place.  There is no doubt that the Babylonians would have been aware of the approach of a conjunction and would have been able to estimate its date within a few days. While the almanac covers the period of the closest approaches of Jupiter and Saturn, the tablets do not allude to these conjunctions.

No conjunction, no unusual heavenly activity.

This rather party-pooping report, of course, does not take into account the miraculous nature of the star itself: "This star was not of the ordinary run of comets or new stars," said Kepler, "but by a special miracle moved in the lower layer of the atmosphere."  Really, I have to admit that the miraculous option is the only one left.  The magic pointing finger created it, as Kepler thought, putting a star between Jupiter and Saturn when they were already fairly close. 

... there shall come a star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel.

Numbers 24.17.  

Have a very happy winter solstice however you celebrate it.   

I wish all my readers the best of health and most interesting of work in 2015.



* Not so fast, Galileo. 'Universal' apparently doesn't mean everyone.  In my opinion, there's still plenty of play room between 8 BC and 4 BC if we want all the stories to fit. It largely depends on when Herod died (the Massacre of the Innnocents has to take place when Christ is two years old), when Christ began preaching -- O lots of things.  Maybe that will be next year's Christmas post.

This is not the first time Zenobia has written about aspects of some Christmas stories.  See The Magi and Christmas , We Twelve Kings of Orient Are, and Whose Christmas Is It Anyway?

Sources

I have made much use of the excellent discussion by Rahlf Hansen, Kepler and the Star of Bethlehem; W. Burke-Gaffney, S.J., Kepler and the Star of Bethlehem; A. J. Sachs & C.B.F.Walker, Kepler's View of the Star of Bethlehem and the Babylonian Almanac for 7/6 B.C., Iraq 46/1, 43-55; and William Eamon's blog, Kepler and the Star of Bethlehem. Other sources include The Galileo Project: Johannes Kepler; D. Hayton, Kepler on supernova, theology and astrology PACHS 2009; Robert S. Westman, Johannes Kepler (Encyclopaedia Britannica); and (last but not least), the witty and wise M. Gardner, The Star of Bethlehem, Skeptical Inquirer 23.6 (1999).

Illustrations

Top: Artwork from De Stella Nova showing the Constellation Ophiuchus with the 1604 supernova marked 'N' in the Serpent-Bearer's foot, as observed by Kepler.

Above left: Portrait of Johannes Kepler, Photo credit: Wikimedia

Below left: Kepler and Solar System (http://cosmologybus.typepad.com/cosmology_bus/johannes-kepler/)Photo via Connor from Victoria, Canada, Science Hero: Johannes Kepler.

Lowest left: Late Babylonian cuneiform tablet from Babylon (?).  British Museum 35429 obverse.  Photo via Sachs & Walker (sources, above).

The Women of Mycenaean Pylos and Knossos (Part III)

(continuing our review of Barbara Olsen's Women in Mycenaean Greece.  Part I click here; Part II here)

The Great Minoan Tradition

During the period that archaeologists call Late Minoan I (ca. 1600-1450 BCE), Crete was at the height of its glory and riches.  The island  was split into at least four regional powers, each ruled from one of the main palaces: Khania in the west, Phaistos/Ayia Triada in the south, Zakro in the east and -- richest of all --  Knossos in the north.*  Despite the damage and shock caused earlier by the volcanic eruption at nearby Santorini, Crete was still peaceful and  prosperous, continuing to trade all over the Aegean and farther afield, with Egypt, Syria, and the Levant.  Palace scribes were keeping their typically Minoan, slightly messy records written on clay tablets in the Linear A script (to this day, undeciphered).  Traditional, distinctively Minoan styles of art and architecture were blossoming; religion and social organization seemed unchanged.

The women of Minoan Crete were always held in high regard -- though it's a mistake to think they ruled the roost.  Very many images clearly show that they held positions of great honour ... and they could appear quite comfortably together with men.**  In matters of ritual and cult, women were probably the supreme gender.  Yet it must be admitted that their public appearances -- as preserved in art -- were apparently limited to religious (and related athletic) activities.

Aristocrats -- whether male or female is unknown -- were busy sending messages from one end of the island to another, using exquisite Minoan gold rings to seal their missives.  Large gold rings -- especially those showing the bull-leapers of Knossos -- were surely used by high officials of the ruling and religious elite.  And someone at Knossos, perhaps of subversive temperament, was exporting such rings to the Mycenaean mainland where many are found in elite burials.

True, there were some clouds on the horizon.  Possibly, the rulers of Knossos had got too close to the Mycenaean powers.

Whatever the proximate cause, this attractive Minoan world came crashing down in a few short years around 1450 BCE -- when palaces, towns, and settlements across the island were destroyed in a rage of violence.  The perpetrators were almost certainly Mycenaean invaders from the Greek mainland.  When the fires stopped burning, there was only one palace left: Knossos.  And the language spoken in its halls was no longer Minoan but Mycenaean Greek.  Knossian bureaucrats now wrote in Linear B, and the administrative set-up of the economy was remarkably close in all its outward manifestations to that of Pylos.***

Yet the Mycenaean-administered palatial state of Knossos is an entity unparalleled on the Mycenaean mainland.  At Mycenaean Knossos, we encounter not a state like Pylos, where an ethnic Mycenaean population is governed by a Mycenaean administration, but rather a hybrid society of both ethnic Minoans and ethnic Mycenaeans under the authority of a Mycenaean administration.

The Aftermath of Conquest

The Linear B records that remain date from about 100 years after the conquest.  We read of men with  Minoan names who are lower in status (for example, many shepherds) than men with Greek names who occupy most of the warrior and official ranks.  That's hardly surprising: to the victor go the spoils.

But what was it like for the women of Crete?  What happened to their status and rights when the Mycenaeans -- whose women had relatively low status (Part II) -- came to rule over a Minoan society which had accorded women a higher social status? 

To answer this question, Prof. Barbara Olsen looked closely at the gender patterns to be teased out of the written records of Knossos.  Were Minoan gender roles and practices assimilated into Mycenaean ones?  Or were there important differences that might argue for the continuation of at least some aspects of a freer, more Minoan approach to women's rights?  Her findings form the third part of our review of her new book, The Women of Mycenaean Pylos and Knossos.

The Women of Knossos

Detail of KN Ap 639 listing women workers and their children

At least 1200 women identified by the ideogram 'Woman' appear in workgroups at Knossos.  In most cases, these lists are very similar to those recording groups of low-status and slave women at Pylos.  However, the women identified by this ideogram are often also listed by name -- which never happens at Pylos.  For example, the 22 women recorded on tablet KN Ap 639 (note the ideogram, generally the first sign on each line) probably worked in the textile industry, though their exact tasks elude us.  Some bear the name of their home towns (e.g. Phaistia, "she of Phaistos"), which suggests their servile status.  Most personal names are Minoan in origin but five are certainly Greek (e.g. Philagra and another 'Rosie').  One is named ke-ra-me-ja -- from which comes our word for 'ceramics'; the lady is a potter or from a potter's family.  Since it is likely that all 22 women are slaves, such Greek names might have been given them by a Greek master who couldn't pronounce their own funny Minoan names -- a common phenomenon in slave cultures.

From Rags to Rags

More than a thousand such low-status women worked in the Knossos textile industry.  However, the women were not concentrated in and around the palace as at Pylos, but laboured in the many towns and villages of central Crete under the control of their Mycenaean overlords.  The cloth industry was far and away the most important business organized by the palace.  The sheer size of the industry is staggering: over 100,000 sheep, along with their shepherds and shearers (male, mostly Minoan names) are tracked in obsessive detail from the grazing lands to the allocation of their wool, and on through the setting of cloth production targets until the final delivery of the many sorts of finished cloth.  All the work of producing the cloth was assigned to women.

While some of these women were certainly slaves, not all of them were.  Rather, the system made use of obligatory corvée labour.  Groups of local women were set specific production targets for different kinds of cloth.  The system was forced, of course, but though labouring for the palace, they remained in their local villages.  While pretty gruelling, this was not slavery.  When they had finished their assigned tasks -- varying from an estimated three to six months of work annually -- they were presumably free for the rest of the year.  This allowed the women to sustain themselves and their families at home.

At Knossos itself, there is no sign of the full-time year-round menial females who did the dirty work at the palace of Pylos.  Slaves who performed the unenviable endless tasks for the palatial elite -- maintaining the water supply, personal attendance, and food-processing -- must have been, in some sense, a private concern. 

At the other end of the social scale are the priestesses.  Given their   prominence in art, documentation of the women who officiated in cult is surprisingly sparse.  A 'priestess of the wind' is mentioned three times: one was at Knossos(?), another at Utanos, and a third at Amnisos. Each received a monthly distribution of olive oil as did a number of other cult officials and divinities alike.  That oil was probably intended for cult purposes rather than for their personal use.  Then, there are the enigmatic groups of ki-ri-te-wi-ja women at Knossos, Amnisos, and Phaistos.  These are low-ranking religious personnel, but above the level of slaves and servants.  Trying to guess their function from their name gives bizarre results.  It could mean 'barley-women' -- perhaps those who served an otherwise unknown 'deity of barley', or women who received or distributed that rather low-grade grain.  Other interpretations are more hopeful (if no more certain), the name perhaps derived from 'chosen' or 'annointed ones'.  Whatever their cult function, each group received a very large monthly ration of wheat -- enough to have fed 500 women of a  workgroup for a month. 

There is no mention of land or other goods being assigned to priestesses or the ki-ri-te-wi-ja women.

In fact there is little indication of the priestesses having a broader economic role in the Knossian state; and no personnel, land, or shrine property are associated with female cult officials.... In contrast to Pylos, where we see nearly all of the property attributed to women in the hands of cult officials, the majority of the property associated with women at Knossos is linked with low- to middle-status women.


She Stoops to Conquer

A key difference with Pylos is that some women at Knossos who are not connected with cult exerted control over textiles, foodstuffs such as wheat and oil (sometimes in very large quantities), wool, linen, and, above all, land -- in the form of orchards. We'll go back to the land in a moment but, first, let's have a look at a woman with the unlikely name of po-po. 

Po-po appears in a supervisory capacity with control over fairly large quantities of raw materials for cloth-making in three tablets (twice linen, once wool).  Her name appears again on two more fragmentary tablets and then on a tablet (Kn L 513) that records her obligation to send a sizeable amount of textiles to the palace: the phrasing indicates that po-po is the person in charge and seems to confirm that she is a workshop supervisor.  The same may be true of other women listed on the textile tablets who have some stated responsibility for the collection or allocation of cloth.  A number of men appear on some of the same tablets with exactly the same obligations as the women: there is no obvious distinction and their obligations are described in the same way. 


Unfortunately, Knossos lacks the careful, detailed records of land-tenure as kept by the scribes of Pylos. We therefore know next to nothing about the land-owning system, and who owned what. Just one series survives: 20 tablets record the ownership or stewardship of groves of fruit-trees. This is enough to show us, however, that men and women held these orchards in a completely analogous fashion.  The phrasing is the same: "[The man] Eriklewes holds an orchard plot".  "[The woman] Perijeja holds an orchard plot".  In another case, a man and a woman are said to have the same kinds of orchards but her holding is five times the size of his.  In short, though the sample is small, the few texts from Knossos look remarkably egalitarian -- with men and women incorporated into the land-holding system in exactly the same way.  

So, overall, Prof. Olsen's analysis strongly suggests that the gender organization of Mycenaean Knossos was not the same as that of Mycenaean Pylos. 

Various women were also attested as having massive amounts of food-stuffs ...raw and finished textile products, and luxury goods .... These women were also held personally accountable for missing property -- further underscoring the notion that the property in question was considered that of these women rather than of their husbands, fathers, or other male relations.  Importantly, none of these property holders were attested to in any context that might suggest they held a religious affiliation, nor were they listed as wives of ranking men.

Fenced-in

Nonetheless, they were decidedly the lesser sex.

The property holdings of Knossian women were significantly limited in both size and scope compared to those of men.  Knossian men of all social rankings controlled a wide range of commodities, most of which never appear with a woman's name attached.  On the contrary, men had access to every commodity that women had and, then too, lots more.  The palace never seemed to give women exotic goods such as spices or ointments, objects made of horn or ivory,  metals or metal vases, nor (obviously) weapons, horses, armour or chariots -- the 'must have' status symbols of the ruling elite.  In short, men controlled far more property than women.

Still, Knossian women were better off than their Pylian sisters.

First of all, it is likely that the women in the textile workgroups -- except for those specifically identified as slaves -- were commandeered for only part of the year as corvée labour.  If so, they were in some senses 'free' and their social standing would have been significantly higher than the slaves of the Pylos groups.  Similarly, there seems to have been legal space for some women to run workshops and take responsibility for their own economic identity.

At Pylos, the only women who controlled significant property belonged to the ranks of priestesses, the only institution that elevated  a few women to an exceptional status.   Even so, they did not achieve parity with men since they did not own the land but held it on lease.  In contrast, Knossian women who had no apparent religious affiliation owned their own land, and the palace recorded their holdings in exactly the same way as for male land holders. It would seem that this was the expected norm 

Quite simply, even a century after the conquest of Crete, mainland institutions do not appear to be governing women's role in the economy.  Differences in gender practices between the states of Pylos and Knossos imply that cultural assimilation was partial and far from complete.  So, where did these differences come from?

I suggest that these differences may likely be holdovers from an earlier period -- for would Mycenaean Greeks introduce gender practices not their own -- and that the most likely source of those holdovers would be Neopalatial Minoan Crete, where women have long  been suspected of enjoying a more egalitarian  status than other women....

Having finished this richly rewarding book, I can only say to Dr Olsen: "Q.E. (Definitely) D".

Women in Mycenaean Greece

The Linear B Tablets from Pylos and Knossos

By Barbara A. Olsen

Routledge – 2014 – 380 pages


Hardback: $140.00
ISBN: 978-0-415-72515-6








*  Olsen references five or more Minoan palatial states, including Malia and Galatas but excluding Khania.  However, there are no signs that those two palaces (unlike Khania) had any written archives in this period, surely a requirement for the administration of a 'state'.   

** Olsen stresses the gender segregation of the Linear B tablets on which men and women are usually divided into male- and female-only tablets.  While gender isolation extends to iconography at Pylos, it certainly less marked on Crete where both sexes are frequently pictured together in cult scenes on gold rings and frescoes, as well as on some major frescoes from the Mycenaean period -- for example, the Procession fresco, the Campstool fresco, and bull-leaping frescoes from Knossos; also at Ayia Triada (cf.: the frescoes from Casa VAP [above] and the famous painted scenes on the Ayia Triada sarcophagus).

*** Interpreting the Linear B tablets from Knossos is even more challenging than at Pylos.  Scribes at Pylos were well-organized: ca. 1100 tablets were filed by subject matter in a single archive inside the palace. Consequently, 50% of those documents were complete and preserved, on average, 25 signs per tablet.  At  Knossos, on the other hand, ca. 3400 tablets were found higgledy-piggledy in a dozen or more parts of the palace, often fallen from upper storeys, and thus rarely intact: 75% of the documents are fragmentary, and the average number of signs per tablet is only 7.7.  Moreover, the broken tablets are frequently missing headings and ideograms. 

Sources:  Besides the book under review, I have made use of L. Baumbach, 'The Personal Names on Knossos Ap Tablets', in (A.M. Etter, ed) O-o-pe-ro-si , Berlin (1986) 273-278; R. Palmer, 'Wheat and Barley in Mycenaean Society', in (J.-P. Olivier, ed) Mykenaika, BCH Suppl. XXV (1992)

Illustrations

Top left: 'Dancing Lady 'from the Queen's Megaron, Knossos.  Photo credit: Oxford University Fine Arts

2nd left: Gold ring from Nemea, CMS V Suppl. IB 113.  Photo credit: CMS Arachne

3rd left: Gold ring from Arkhanes-Phourni.  Photo credit: OU Fine Arts [Note: the date given for the ring on this site is far too early; it should be LM I) 

4th left: Female taureador (her skin is white, following the Minoan convention [derived from the Egyptian] of picturing females as white, men as red) dressed in male athletic garb: Bull-leaping panel from Court of the Stone Spout, Knossos.  Photo credit: Zenobia (in the Heraklion Museum)

5th left: Detail from a Linear B tablet Ap 639 from Knossos recording women textile workers and their children, around 1375-1350 BC.  Photo credit: Ashmolean Museum

Centre: Reconstruction of the fresco panel from Casa VAP,  LM III Ayia Triada (Heraklion Museum).  Photo credit: Dr Santo Privitera, to whom I am most grateful for the picture. 

Lower left: Detail from Ayia Triada sarcophagus.  Photo credit: OU Fine Arts [Note: the date given for the sarcophagus on this site is too early] 

Bottom left: Bronze statuette of female worshipper, c. 1600-1500 BC, Middle Minoan III-Late Minoan I Crete.  Cleveland Museum of Art.  Photo credit: Boundless blog

The Women of Mycenaean Pylos and Knossos (Part II)

The Essence of Woman

(continuing Zenobia's review of Barbara Olsen's Women in Mycenaean Greece.  Part I click here)

The Linear B tablets found in the palaces at Pylos on the Greek mainland and Knossos on Crete are the oldest documents ever written in Greek  They are without exception administrative records (inventories, accounts, and lists of names and personnel).  While they record information on some 5,000 men, they also document the palaces' interest in more than 2,000 women.  In fact, these tablets are one of the largest sets of evidence for real women's lives in any period of Greek antiquity. 

Unfortunately for us, the palaces were not interested in reporting on their private lives (loves, friendships, family).  Rather, women are only documented because they are, in some way, connected with the economic institutions of the palace -- whether involved in commodity production, property holdings, land tenure, or cult practice.  The result is that, at Pylos and Knossos, scribes recorded women's economic activities in public or civic -- rather than domestic -- contexts.  Women (like men) are listed either as individuals with names or titles, or as undifferentiated members of collective groups.

Who are these 2,000 women?  How do they compare in status and power to the men who are recorded in the Linear B tablets?  Prof. Barbara Olsen (Vassar College) has brought together for the first time all of the references to women in the Linear B tablets from the two best-documented Mycenaean sites (1400-1200 BCE).  As far as written sources are concerned, it is the low-down on everything there is to know -- or possibly ever will be known -- about Myceanean women.

The Belated Death of Matriarchy

The numbers alone (5000:2000) should be the first red alert: the tablets reflect societies where men's production and holdings were more important than those of women.  Of course, it might also be possible for women to hold the same types of commodities and property as men -- but at approximately 30% of the amount, reflecting their proportion in the tablets.  Alas, as Prof. Olsen irrefutably demonstrates, this is not at all the case. The documents reflect societies where men's production and holdings were much more significant to the palaces than those of women.

The palaces of the Late Bronze Age Aegean were not egalitarian in matters of gender.  If any of my readers still believe that there was a feminist tilt at that time, get over it now.  This book is ruthless in its incidental demolition of any such idea.  Women's holdings differed from men's not just in scale but also in substance.  As a sex, women held significantly less property and received fewer commodities (whether slaves or livestock, foodstuffs, textiles, leather goods, bronze, or precious objects such as gold vases and ivory) than men.

The archives from both palaces reveal strictly gendered societies where an individual's sex opens or limits access to various occupations and to specific commodities or resources and ultimately governs his or her access to civic office, control over property, and public functions.  In short gender is constructed at both Bronze Age palaces in a way so that men and women largely experience their societies in very distinct ways.

Women at both sites had more limited access to commodities, were excluded from the highest political offices, and were socially and economically subordinate to men.  In short, the palaces were patriarchal in their social, economic, and political organizations.  The only ray of light is in the religious sphere, but we'll get to that in a moment.

First the gloom. 

Separate and Unequal 

On the left is The Mycenaean Woman as expressed by a scribe writing in Linear B.*

Lazy bureaucrat that he was, he used a shorthand picture (ideogram) instead of writing out the whole word: just a semi-circle for her head, a skirt, and dot breasts was quite enough to make it clear that he meant 'Woman'.  

What could be simpler?

Except that no Mycenaean scribe ever drew such a neat, clean ideogram.  What Mycenaean scribes actually sketched was much sloppier; like this:

A rag, a bone, and a hank of hair

Who were these carelessly-drawn women?  They could not have been further from the high-priestess Eritha (Part I) in rank, status, and -- especially -- autonomy.  Never personally named or differentiated in any way as individuals, they belong to single-sex female work groups that were assigned by palace officials to menial, labour-intensive work.  They are the anonymous women who, day after day, would card wool, spin thread, weave, sew, and decorate cloths.  These are not Penelopes but some of Penelope's nameless maids.  They are flour-grinders (a perpetual, unhealthy task), sweepers who clean the palace, water-carriers and bath attendants, launderers, or simply personal servants.  For which work, the women (along with their minor children) received standard subsistence rations of wheat and figs.  And that's it.

In a word, they are slaves.

The Slave Women of Pylos

At Pylos, 7 women wool-carders, 4 girls, 4 boys: wheat 240.4 litres, figs 230.4 litres; 1 supervisor(?)

Such servile low-status women make up by far the largest group of women documented in the Linear B tablets at Pylos (more than 750 out of nearly 900 women).  There is no evidence for extra-palatial craftswomen who might have conducted economic activities in their own right.  In contrast to Pylian men, not a single free, economically independent women is listed in any craft or trade.  Female workers always appear without any property of their own, labouring in collective work groups in return for bare subsistence rations.

Except for just one woman -- Kessandra (the meaning of whose name hints at a future Cassandra, "who speaks solemnly to the men"**).  Kessandra receives more than 25 times the amounts of wheat and figs that a workgroup woman would get as rations.  This is the largest, and perhaps only, real property attributed to a Pylian woman who is not expressly in cult service.  Clearly, Kessandra (who appears on five tablets) is a very different mess of pottage compared to the menial laborers who are no more than ideograms to us.  The best explanation is that she is one of the female supervisors whose job may have been to dole out rations to the female workgroups.  Whatever her exact role or status (slave, free, or freed), she is the only such woman in the Pylos archive, an exception that proves the rule.

The Seven Merry Wives of Pylos

Only a handful of named women appear on the tablets without any religious titles.  Six women listed on a single tablet (PY Vn 34+) are all pendants to their husbands: the man's name comes first, followed by the woman's name and the number one. Each couple apparently receives one portion or piece of whatever is being distributed.  Three of the men are known from other sources where we are able to identify them as prominent elite Pylian officials.

[Their] wives would appear to occupy a high level of prestige -- presumably they were aristocrats -- but their high social status does not translate to a similarly high level of economic status.  Put simply, these women have no major property holdings allocated to them as distinct individuals ... and consequently no real economic authority or autonomy.

One couple, however, Metianor and his wife Wordieria ('Rosie'), pop up again as recipients of leather goods from the palace storerooms: he gets 1 prepared hide and 3 red-leather hides; she gets 10 pigskins, 2 deerskins, 1 ox-hide, and two (pairs?) of sandals with matching ox-hide laces.  A second woman  -- perhaps a merry widow since no man's name is appended -- gets pigskins, deerskins and something with fringes(?).  Those skins and sandals are the only non-edible goods, as far as we know, allocated to any woman outside of the religious sphere.  With the best will in the world, we cannot magnify a pair of sandals into female economic power.

Let there be light

Priestess, Keybearer, Servant of the god, Servant of the Priestess, or Servant of the Keybearer

The five titles of female cult officials specifically identity 120 Pylian women as religious functionaries.  These are the only women both named and titled in all of the Pylos texts.  And they differ in nearly every way from their lay sisters.

Religious officialdom not only lends to Pylian women a visibility not accorded to their secular peers but also provides for functionary women an exceptional status where many of the usual restrictions on women's access to resources and economic power are lifted.

First and foremost, these are the only women who exercise control over land at Pylos even if they did not achieve full parity with men.  While all five categories of cult-affiliated women are known to have held land-leases, none is attested as land-owner.  Nonetheless, they shared the ability to redistribute sanctuary resources and land.  The priestess Eritha was at the very top of the pile, able to challenge her community council in a legal dispute over land and to represent herself to make her case.  Other priestesses and keybearers had access to bronze (the key raw material of the time) and received textiles and other goods intended either for use in the cult or for their personal use.  They supervised low- and mid-ranked personnel, owned slaves, both male and female -- one priestess is granted 14 female slaves "on account of the sacred gold" -- and appear on tablets (PY An 1281, Fn 50, Jn 829) alongside male officials listed in ways analogous to the men -- among the very rare cases when both men and women are recorded on the same tablet.

So at Pylos, as eight centuries later in Classical Athens, religion lent certain women an exceptional status in that economic restriction and subordination were overruled for them by the requirements of cult.  Priestly women had, at least to some extent, economic autonomy.  But, of course, it was also the only place where women had any economic power in their own right. As Prof. Olsen puts it, "religion functioned as an economic wildcard in terms of Pylian gender roles."

So much for Pylos! You wouldn't really expect more from those Mycenaean-Greeks; would you? But what about Knossos in the Mycenaean period (after 1450 BCE)?  What was the status, what were the rights of the post-Minoan women of the Knossian state? Were there any real or significant differences between the gender biases of Pylos and those of Mycenaean Knossos where the conquerors governed a mixed Mycenaean and Minoan population? 

The next post follows Barbara Olsen to Crete as she examines the "wildcards" that were played out in the daily lives of women at Knossos under Mycenaean rule. 

Part III: The Women of Mycenaean Pylos and Knossos

Women in Mycenaean Greece

The Linear B Tablets from Pylos and Knossos

By Barbara A. Olsen

Routledge – 2014 – 380 pages


Hardback: $140.00
ISBN: 978-0-415-72515-6

*The comparable ideogram for a man (left) was a simple forked stick, with some slight stress on the shoulder line, and a barest sketch of the head.
Collected ideograms of MUL and VIR from J. Weilhartner, "Gender Dimorphism in the Linear A and Linear B Tablets", in Kosmos, Aegaeum 33 (2012) 287-296, Fig. LXVI 5, Fig. 9: https://www.academia.edu/1777935/Gender_Dimorphism_in_the_Linear_A_and_Linear_B_Tablets.

** Though, of course, it may just be built on the masculine name Kessandros, since it is "not conceivable" that any Mycenaean woman would speak so to men: J.L. GARCÍA RAMÓN, 'Mycenaean Onomastics', in "A Companion to Linear B Vol. 2 (Y. Duhoux - A. Morpurgo Davis, eds) Louvain, 2011, 225, 226.

Illustrations

Upper left: Fresco fragment, the 'White Goddess' from the NW slope, Pylos; end 14th C BCE.  Photo credit: http://www.tumblr.com/search/mycenaean+frescoes

Second left: Fresco fragment, 'La Parisienne' from the Campstool Fresco, Knossos; 14th C BCE. Photo credit: http://onassisusa.intelligentlearningmedia.com/blogos/?p=266

Centre: Fresco fragment, "Women in a loggia" from ramp house deposit, Mycenae.  Photo credit: http://www.ou.edu/finearts/art/ahi4913/aegeanhtml/mycptg2.html 

Below: Fresco fragment, Woman with a decorated ivory box (pyxis): reconstruction of figure from Women's frieze Tiryns.  Photo credit:Wikimedia Commons

Eritha, A Mycenaean Uppity Woman

Around the year 1300 B.C.E., a priestess named Eritha argued a law suit against the governing council of the district of Pa-ki-ja-na (= Sphagianes, "the place of ritual slaughter").  Eritha was high-priestess of the religious sanctuary at Sphagianes where she served the great Mycenaean-Greek goddess, Potnia (meaning "Our Lady" or "Mistress").  

Eritha the priestess claims that the land she holds is a 'freehold' on behalf of her divinity, but the damos [district council] says that she holds a plot of leased communal land.

Eritha v District of Sphagianes

The legal issue is clear: if Eritha had leased the land from the commune as an individual person, it would be taxable.  Eritha asserted, however, that she held it as "freehold" on behalf of her goddess, and thus it was free of all fiscal and service obligations.  This was no trivial dispute.  The amount of land involved was substantial.  It was also prime arable land located not far from the town of Pylos, where the king (the wanax) who then ruled over this part of Greece had his palace. 

We know about this legal case because it was recorded on a clay tablet (PY Ep 704) written in Linear B (the earliest known form of Greek) by a bureaucrat working in the palace of Pylos.  Faced with two powerful, competing entities -- a senior priestess versus her local governing council -- the scribe either lacked the will or the authority to decide whose claim took priority and simply recorded both claims as items to be dealt with at some later date.  In time-honoured bureaucratic form, he "kicked it upstairs".  Presumably, the king himself would have decided the case ... had not the mortal enemies of Pylos chosen this time to attack his capital.  And so it happened that, in the year that Eritha challenged the district council, the palace went up in flames and the kingdom collapsed. 

Death and taxes

The fire that destroyed the palace unexpectedly baked and thus preserved the Eritha v District of Sphagianes tablet. Like so many other ancient court cases, we do not know how this dispute was resolved nor even if the king had time to hear any arguments before disaster overtook him.  All we really know is that Eritha had an active dispute with the local government of Sphagianes and had challenged them over the classification of a large chunk of land.  

Presumably, every landholder in the community of Sphagianes shared the obligation to pay a certain amount of annual tax to the palace.  If Eritha's property wasn't taxable, the missing amount would have been shared out among the other landholders when the taxman came to collect whatever was due to the king.  The prospect of heavier burdens for the rest of the community (not to mention for themselves) must have prompted council members  to object to Eritha's claim.  Eritha, however, was trying to protect the interests of her goddess and sanctuary (though it's not impossible she had also slipped a bit of private land into the divine freehold).  Both the district council and the sanctuary had the wherewithal to act as independent legal entities.  And both sides tried to get the most out of the system for their supporters and also possibly for themselves.

Her-story

This seemingly everyday squabble is actually of huge importance in women's history because it tells us, first of all, that Eritha must have had legal access to both private and official land holdings; otherwise there could be no dispute.  Clearly, despite being a woman, Eritha could legally own, or lease, arable land -- the most important commodity in an agrarian economy and the basis of all status and power.  Eight centuries later, Greek women -- at least those of whom we know anything, like the ladies of Classical Athens -- no longer had such rights: they could own personal effects like jewellery, clothes, and household goods, but (with very few exceptions) nothing more.  

Second, Eritha apparently had the authority to plead her own case.  No husband, guardian, or son is mentioned.  Remarkably, she was able to defend her own economic interests against her local governing council. And she did so in public. Again, no later Greek woman, not even a priestess, would have been able to represent herself in a legal dispute, let alone challenge public authorities.  Such audacity cannot have been common.  In fact, we hear of no legal case brought by a male official or landowner.  It is extraordinary (at least from the viewpoint of gender politics) that this is the only law suit recorded in the entire Linear B corpus.

Eritha thus has the dubious distinction of having argued the first legal case ever known in Europe.

An Uppity Woman

As chief priestess of "Our Lady", the great goddess Potnia, Eritha had an exceptionally high status.  She held leases in her own name on rather a lot of different tracts of land in the district, as well as having the authority to disburse some of this land to her own subordinates.  For example, she made a grant of land as a 'gift of honour' to a woman named Huamia, who was described as a 'servant of the divinity' (PY Eb 416; PY Ep 704).  Apparently, she had the right to reassign her own land holdings in accordance with her personal wishes.  Other tablets tell of two of her slaves (or servants) who each held a small allotment of public land: her high rank meant that even her lowly underlings qualified for official land holdings (PY Eb 1176; PY En 609).

Behind every uppity woman is a power base, in this case the cult sanctuary at Sphagianes.  Potnia and her shrine were closely linked with palatial cult and power.  The king of Pylos made monthly offerings to the great goddess and lesser deities connected with her sanctuary.  A unique tablet (PY Tn 316) records gifts to the gods in connection with a religious ritual.  Found in the  central archive of the palace, the tablet lists gifts of thirteen gold vases and ten human beings (8 women, 2 men) to female and male deities in order of descending importance.  Potnia takes pride of place  She is clearly the principle deity for the royal house at Pylos, at least at this time of year [July-August?]:

During the Month of Sailing.
And he [the king?] is performing a holy ceremony.
And he is bringing and carrying gifts to the shrine at Sphagianes.
To Potnia: 1 gold goblet, 1 woman [servant?]

Then, four minor goddesses who reside with Potnia at her shrine are given simpler gold bowls (plus two woman servants).  From the language used, it appears that the primary activity of the event was a procession and ritual performance at which the king offered gifts of gold vessels and female servants to Potnia and associated goddesses.

Beware of Mycenaean-Greeks bearing gifts

Which brings us back to the land at the centre of the dispute between the priestess Eritha and the damos of Sphagianes.  Can it have begun with a lavish royal gift of land given by the king to Potnia? The palace certainly had the power to tax the land of Sphagianes.  Perhaps the king simply comandeered a parcel of their communal land, declared it free of taxes, and presented it as a religious offering to the goddess.  If so, the district council's protest may have been aimed not so much at the alienation of land as the fiscal consequences -- a problem which only the king could resolve.  Thus, the dispute might have involved not two but three centres of power: the king, the damos, and Eritha fighting her corner on behalf of the shrine of Potnia.   

No wonder the palace scribe 'kicked it upstairs' for a royal decision.

A One-And-Only Eritha

This post was meant to review a marvelous new book, Women in Mycenaean Greece: The Linear B Tablets from Pylos and Knossos, by Barbara Olsen (Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar College).  For better or worse, I got carried away by the extraordinary implications of Eritha v District of Sphagianes.  Eritha, however, was an altogether exceptional woman.  She was not representative even of other high-born women at Pylos, let alone those of the middling or lower classes.  What rights had they?  What kind of lives did they lead?  We'll turn to that in the next post.  Consider Eritha's story, thus, as a kind of trailer for my upcoming review Barbara Olsen's fascinating study of the women at Pylos and Knossos. 

Part II: The Women of Mycenaean Pylos and Knossos
 
Sources

Barbara Olsen, Women in Mycenaean Greece: The Linear B Tablets from Pylos and Knossos, Routledge, London and New York, 2014; Susan Lupack, "Redistribution in Mycenaean Societies. A View from Outside the Palace: The Sanctuary and the Damos in Mycenaean Economy and Society", American Journal of Archaeology 115 (2011) 207-17; T.G. Palaima, "Kn 02 - Tn 316",  Floreant Studia Mycenaea.  Acts of the 10th International Mycenaean Colloquium in Salzburg , Vienna, 1999, 437-456.

Illustrations

Top: Fresco of the "Mycenaean Lady" from the Cult Centre, Acropolis of Mycenae. National Archaeological Museum, Athens inv. no. 11670. Photo credit:

Middle:"Goddess with Sheaves of Grain", Room of the Frescoes, Citadel House, Mycenae. Nauplion Museum.

Below: Two-handled gold goblet, the so-called 'Cup of Nestor' from Shaft Grave IV (Grave Circle A), Mycenae.  Photo credit: http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/mycenae.html

Amta, Daughter of Yarha. Alas!

In the year 113 CE,  a rich Palmyran merchant named Taibul (or TYBL in his native Palmyrene) built a grand underground tomb for himself and his family, for their burials to be secure ... and remembered forever. 

The name of the tomb's founder and date of construction were inscribed on the lintel-stone discovered outside his 'House of Eternity'.  The tomb itself ('H' on the map: click to enlarge) lies about five kilometres southeast of Palmyra, in a large cemetery where all the tombs are subterranean -- so, when you get to the site, you don't see anything except, here and there, low heaps of sand-covered rubble from collapsed towers.  In fact, at the end of the dirt-track that leads to the necropolis, there appears to be only empty stony desert. 

However, the lack of anything to see above ground is more than made up for by what is hidden below: in 2002, Japanese archaeologists discovered this intact tomb from the period of Palmyra's rise to greatness.*  A tomb unlooted, and rich.  TYBL had been twice lucky.

Into the Tomb of TYBL

Leaving the brilliant desert sunlight behind, you pass through a massive single-slab door, descend the stone staircase, and find yourself in a long spacious room.  On the opposite wall there are three separate burial vaults; the most prominent is the central exedra (the semicircular arcade in the middle) with simpler arched chambers on either side.  Taibul lies with his nearest and dearest in the central vault -- set apart from more distant or less prestigious relatives by a great arch flanked by two pilasters with elaborately decorated capitals. Inside the exedra, three elegant stone funerary banqueting couches are arranged as if for a feast in a Roman dining room (triclinium).  Finely-sculpted figures of men, women, and children make up the banqueters.

No inscriptions have been published from the exedra but Taibul, as the family patriarch, is surely the middle figure reclining in the place of honour.  As the centre of the family scene, he would be the first person met by his descendants as they entered the chamber bringing vessels filled with water and wine to drink ceremoniously with their dead ancestors.  On his right sits his wife and son and, to the left (presumably) his brother and brother's wife.  More family members are memorialized on the sarcophagus below.  

Two stone couches placed on either side of Taibul's splendid monument are filled with men and women, surely close relatives, reclining or sitting according to sex and status, with still more family busts below.  Thus, three families are simultaneously joining in Taibul's funerary banquet while also celebrating their own.   

High Relief and False Sarcophagi

At the far end of the tomb, another arched chamber would have been immediately visible to anyone entering the tomb.  In the centre of its back wall, two sculptures in high relief are fitted into a niche. The top piece depicts a man reclining on a couch (although the couch is not actually illustrated), his three children standing behind him.  Below, two men, perhaps an adult son and his (predeceased?) father, take up two-thirds of the relief, leaving little space on their couch for a diminutive wife and two children.  These high reliefs are false sarcophagi.  They imitate the motif of the funerary banquet but are unusable, of course, for the deposition of the dead -- as they hang in the air and have no depth.  So, they are images of the dead for commemorative purposes only.  We really don't know what happened to the bodies of the people depicted on them but they might have been placed in the now-empty loculi which are visible to the left and right of the niche.

Loculi

Naturally, not everyone is privileged to have sumptuous funerary monuments.

The simpler burials lack elaborate funerary couches and large sepulchres.  Instead, the dead are buried in loculi, narrow coffin-like horizontal spaces cut into the walls of the tomb.  Each loculus was sealed by a limestone slab portraying the head and upper body of the dead person interred within. 

Or rather, as recent excavation shows, the portrait of one of the dead persons within.  For, oddly enough, a loculus was not used for just a single body. Usually several bodies were buried inside even if there were many unused loculi nearby.  Since this is quite a recent discovery, we do not yet have any idea how they chose whose portrait would be used to seal the loculus.  Even odder, the sex of the bodies buried inside does not seem to determine the sex of the bust on the outside of the grave: all we can say is that interred dead males are generally more numerous than females.  Both sexes were placed inside with their heads facing the innermost wall.  And neither sex was buried with any grave goods except for the clothes that they wore on their bodies.  Dead infants, on the other hand, placed in pits in the floor of the funerary chambers, were given some small objects like glass beads and bronze bells to take with them to the other world.  

So, in death, as perhaps also in life, the ties of the extended Palmyran family were enormously strong.  Taibul's tomb served primarily the burial needs of his kin, based, I would think (as with  much of the elite), on cross-cousin marriages.  Publication is still  incomplete but we may imagine a tomb filled to the brim with stone images of Taibul's brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, children, and grandchildren, all commemorated in the tomb's funerary art.

Or, sadly, of what remains of its funerary art.

Two Ladies from Taibul's Tomb

This richly-adorned lady, whose name is lost, is almost certainly the same woman who is pictured on the upper left of the loculi wall above.  Her face, hairstyle and turban match and her pose is the same: right hand holding spindle; index finger in the pointing gesture; spread fingers of her left hand holding her veil.  This is, of course, a very common female gesture.  Her specific jewellery confirms the identification: the bracelet and the shapes, number, and size of her necklaces are identical with the jewels worn by the lady on the wall.  But she is no longer on her wall.  Her grave-stone was jimmied off  and taken from the tomb by looters.  

Alas, Taibul, your luck has run out.

The Tipping Point

The four-year civil war has killed more than 200,000 people and forced millions more to flee their homes. It is also destroying some of the world's most important art, buildings and monuments. As the war grinds on, illegal excavation and the looting of antiquities is running riot.  Sometimes the thieves are soldiers in the Syrian army.  Others are criminal gangs, crazed iconoclasts, or just desperate unemployed and hungry men.  It hardly matters: the resulting destruction of Syria's heritage is the same.  

Amidst the gloom, however, are rare flashes of light, such as the lucky swoop by the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums that recovered the anonymous bejewelled lady from Taibul's tomb (reported on the Palmyra History and Archaeology website, with photographs of recovered loot).

The authorities must sometimes get tip-offs.  In just a single month  this year, they intercepted three different lots of looted Palmyran antiquities on their way to the international market (click for illustrations of the recovered objects): on 6 March 2014, 16 March 2014, and 30 March 2014.  April was much the same.  June and September were worse.**  And so it goes. These objects had all originated from known tomb groups or museum storerooms.  What is perhaps even more disturbing is the consignment seized on 19 June 2014, none of which was known to archaeologists, which means that illegal digging of unexcavated tombs is taking place around the city despite Palmyra being nominally under the control of the Syrian army.  

Amta, Daughter of Yarha. Alas!

The grave-stone of Amta, Daughter of Yarha (left) had also been stolen from Taibul's tomb and was among the group recovered on 26th August.  As she is not pictured on the loculi wall but was registered among the tomb's unpublished contents, it seems all too likely that the thieves have emptied Taibul's tomb of its entire contents.  Can we doubt that all the funerary banquets, sarcophagi, high reliefs, and busts have also been cut from the walls -- and already crossed the border into Lebanon to be sold on to rich European, American, and Gulf collectors? 

Amta will be going back home, it is true, but her context is forever lost. Perhaps because of her beauty, the Syrian authorities gave her a whole page of her own boasting of her recovery.  Amta deserves her 15 minutes of fame.  But then, again, the gloom descends.   'Alas!' is the Palmyran last cry for the dead.  

Amta, Daughter of Yarha. Alas!


*    Prof. Kiyohide Saito and the Japanese Archaeological Mission to Palmyra have been exploring, excavating, and restoring tombs in the Southeast Necropolis since 1991.  Their final research report summary (2004) is available at the Kaken website.

** A few days ago, it was reported that the entire Southeast Necropolis has now been looted. 

Illustrations

Top left: Plan of Palmyra's Southeastern necropolis with location of Talbul's tomb (Tomb H) circled.  Credit: Palmyra History and Archaeology

Centre: Isometric plan of Taibul's tomb.  Credit: Palmyra History and Archaeology

Second left: Exedra of Taibul's tomb. Credit: Sumitomo Foundation

Third and Fourth left:  Inside Taibul's tomb.  Credit: Palmyra History and Archaeology 1, Palmyra History and Archaeology 2

Fifth left: Anonymous lady looted from Taibul's tomb.  Credit: DGAM

Bottom left: Amta, Daughter of Yarha.  Credit: DGAM

Egyptian 'Tomb Treasures of the Late Middle Kingdom' (Part II)

The Archaeology of Female Burial

Continuing my review of Grajetzki, Tomb Treasures of the Late Middle Kingdom

Yes, I did say in Part I of this post that I would stop harping on the gorgeous jewellery of 12th Dynasty royal women and show you some serious implements of authority and war instead.  Well, sorry, girls will be girls. So hang on a moment and we'll get to blood and guts after the bling.

This is the pyramid of Pharaoh Senusret III (ca. 1837-1818 BCE) at Dahshur.   Around the king's enormous pyramid are clusters of smaller pyramids inhabited in death by his wives and daughters. Each such peripheral pyramid had an underground burial chamber containing the sarcophagus and two side chambers, presumably chapels dedicated to the cult of the deceased.  

X Marks the Spot

Instead of separate units for each queen or daughter of the royal loins, as was customary, there was (left) a most unusual underground  gallery connecting the burial chambers beneath the four small pyramids on the north side.  Under the first gallery, a lower shaft provided access to a long vaulted corridor connecting the four sets of chambers each with their sarcophagus and canopic chest.  

Long before the French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan explored these galleries in 1894/5, they had been entered by tomb robbers -- probably during the Hyksos period (ca. 1650-1550 BCE) -- and all the sarcophagi were opened and looted.

I can well imagine the first reaction of De Morgan when he found the open sarcophagi and scattered debris left by the ancient thieves: after digging the main pyramid and finding nothing but dust in the king's  sarcophagus, and then these ransacked tombs, he might well have been a bit disheartened.  But the robbers had been careless or perhaps confounded (not expecting, I imagine, to find buried treasure in a tomb) and so missed two boxes filled with jewellery that had been placed in holes dug into the floor.

Thus, a lucky Monsieur de Morgan hit the jackpot: finding one badly decayed, partly gilded treasure chest on 6 March 1894, and another two days later.

Fit for a pharaoh's daughter

The first box almost certainly belonged to Princess Sithathor, as the box contained a scarab with her name and title, 'King's daughter Sithathor, lady of honour'.

It seems that the princess took with her to the grave much of the jewellery that she had already worn during her lifetime: the gold was much heavier than the thin or gold-leaf items that are usually found on mummies.  Surely her most cherished possession was this pectoral collar (above) made of gold, carnelian, lapis lazuli, and turquoise, with the throne name of her father (?) Senusret II in the central cartouche.  On both sides of the cartouche a Horus falcon wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt is perched on the hieroglyphic sign for 'gold'. 

Other masterpieces from her treasure include two bracelets (left) of  hundreds of beads in alternate rows of lapis lazuli, carnelian, and turquoise with gold spacer bars between them, and fastening pieces in the shape of a djed pillar (the sign 'Stability!'). Similar bracelets with djed-pillar clasps were found in the nearby burial of Senusret III's principle queen Weret II, a tomb only discovered in 1995.*

Smiting the enemy

The second treasure in the gallery belonged to the king's daughter (possibly also king's wife) Mereret.  Her box contained an even greater number of goodies including two pectoral collars -- one with the throne name of Senusret III and one naming Amenemhat III, his successor.**  The later pectoral (above) depicts a vulture  protecting the scene under its outstretched wings.  The king's throne name appears twice within a cartouche, between which is written "The good god, lord of the two lands, beating all foreign lands".  Not to leave any doubt, the enemies about to be clobbered are identified by a label which reads, "smiting Asiatics".  Accordingly, the king is (twice) shown smiting kneeling enemies with a mace. 

A mace?

Yes, that's how pharaohs smite:

Your mace is over the head of every foreign land ....

The depiction of the king on foot with mace raised ready to crack the skulls of his enemies is very ancient and it doesn't change much over time.  But why a mace?  Maces are basically only wooden clubs with a head made of some heavy and hard material, in this case stone. As one of the earliest weapons in ancient Egypt, the skull-smashing mace became a source of royal prowess long after it was abandoned as a practical weapon. Perhaps this was because the mace is a weapon requiring great force, rather than any particular skill, and so became a symbol of overwhelming power.

But that alone does not explain why the mace-wielding smiting scene endured for some 3,000 years: even Egypt's Roman pharaohs continued to crush opponents with a mace, at least on temple walls.  In fact, this is probably the longest-lasting and best-attested image in Egyptian culture.  Its staying power may well lie in its echo of the cosmic conflict between the gods Horus and Seth, their everlasting battle of good against evil, and the victory of order over chaos. The pharaoh was considered to be an incarnation of the falcon god Horus, the posthumous son of Osiris, a divine king slain by his brother, Seth.

Horus has brought Seth to thee [Osiris-King], he has given him to thee, bowed down under thee.  (Pyr. 1632a)

Which brings us back to Mereret.

In Tomb Treasures of the Late Middle Kingdom, Wolfram Grajetzkio describes 76 pieces of  jewellery and precious objects found in her treasure chest: number 74 is listed simply as  'A mace head.'  So Mereret, too, amidst all her gold and dainty bangles took a royal weapon with her to the grave.***  She is far from the only royal lady buried with weapons and royal regalia.  As we saw in Part I,  Dr Grajetzki's careful listing of finds from the few intact female burials, credit all of the women with one or more maces, daggers, bows, arrows, and even spears -- as well as wooden staffs, flails, and sceptres of authority.  

In a word, these are standard features of the 'Court Type' elite burials -- for women as well as men. 

True, Mereret had just a single mace head in her treasure box -- but who knows how many weapons and regalia had originally been buried with her and later looted from her grave?  A goodly number, I would say, given those in intact female 'Court Type' burials.   But the "Most Weapons Award" should probably go to the comparatively  non-aristocratic 'Lady of the House', Senebtisi, whose unlooted tomb was excavated at Lisht in 1906/07 by Herbert Winlock of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lady Senebtisi lacked nothing when it came to worldly goods.  Despite not having a royal title, she nonetheless had a 'Court Type' burial.  Her mummy was adorned with loads of jewellery (three broad collars, gold necklaces, gold hair ornaments made of 98 golden rosettes, armlets, anklets, and much much more).  She also had a full panopoly of royal sceptres and staffs, a beaded flail (similar to that on the left), two bows, an alabaster mace with a gold-mounted shaft, a rock crystal mace-head, and a copper dagger with gilded wooden sheath.

She was, it seems, quite ready to have a battle royal.  Yet I don't think for a moment that she was a warrior-woman in any way, shape, or form [in this, disagreeing with Rebecca Dean (see Sources, below)].  Nor can we really explain the weapons and regalia as a means of projecting their worldly power: if anything, there seems to be a decrease in women's and thus queens' status in the Middle Kingdom.

Wolfram Grajetzki is, of course, well aware of the fact that female Court-Type burials contain muddled gender-related goods.  In fact, he takes us on a tour of rich tombs in other ancient cultures where weapons are occasionally buried with high-ranking women.  But there really isn't much known about female burials in the Middle Bronze Age around the eastern Mediteranean, the time period of this post.  So, he doesn't say much -- except to warn against the danger of projecting our own gender expections onto ancient burials.  

How true.

Dr Grajetzki does, however, put his finger on the underlying symbolism -- if only alluding to it briefly -- when he says: 

Although these insignia and weapons are in other contexts associated with gender and in many cultures more typical for burials of men, they appear as ritual object in late Middle Kingdom tombs of women.  In this context they are not gender related but confirm the identity of the deceased as Osiris, and clearly show that the deceased was treated as Osiris in ritual.

What has Osiris to do with it? 

It's complicated.

In ancient Egypt, the act of creating new life was not attributed to females.  Rather, the male created the 'spark of life' while the female's role was to stimulate the male sexually and then receive his child (fully formed in the semen) into her nuturing body.  That's how it was supposed to work both for earthly fertility (having babies) as well as for -- a crucial mental leap -- the rejuvenation of the dead.  It all goes back to the Creation.

Atum and Osiris

In the Egyptian creation myth, the primal deity Atum brought forth all creation via masturbation.  The only female entity involved was his hand --  the word 'hand' is grammatically feminine in Egyptian -- which helped Atum create himself by acting as the stimulant.  Thus, the deceased says:

I am Atum who made the sky and created what exists, who came forth from the earth, who created seed, Lord of All, who fashioned the god, the Great God, the Lord of Life.... (Book of the Dead, Spell 79)

Osiris, god of the netherworld, has the same creative power, somewhat weirdly creating his own rebirth after his murder and dismemberment by his brother Seth.  When his sister-wife Isis had reassembled him in a wrapped human form (i.e. the first mummy), Osiris magically recreated himself through the same act of masturbation as Atum.  Osiris essentially raises himself from the dead.  When his body had been reunited by mummification, that sexual act reawakened him to life.  Hence, the transition to the blessed afterlife became a model for mortals, but one that only really worked for the male sex.  The female had no active role in the mechanism of rebirth.

You can well imagine that this created problems for half of the elite world.  Nonetheless...

You will become Osiris (CT, Spell 4)

The circle was squared by having the dead take on a masculine form once placed inside the sarcophagus, regardless of the original gender of the body.  To start with, both male and female deceased likened themselves to the god of rebirth, assuming the name of Osiris + their personal name.  Thus, for example, Zenobia would have become Osiris-Zenobia (regardless of her female sex).  This would give her the regenerative powers of a creator god, simultaneously masculine and divine.  Second, her mummy  was shaped into the form of Osiris, with the same wrappings whether the person inside was male or female.  Third, scribes stuck to the masculine pronouns he and him instead of the feminine she and her when writing magical texts on a woman's coffin.  All together, this meant that the deceased female was given a temporary masculine divine identity in order to be reborn after death. 

Wake up!  May you appear as Osiris... in your hand is the sceptre, in your hand is the flail.

Yes, but to be sure to wake up in the 'Fields of Peace' I suggest we add a fourth way for wily elite women to masculinize themselves: let them place in their tombs such manly objects as weapons, the regalia of kings, and even metal tools.

If nothing else, this will confuse generations of Egyptologists.

But don't worry.  After becoming one of the 'blessed dead',  the lady returns to her feminine self, her true form for all eternity.




*  In 1994, the Metropolitan Museum of Art investigated a shaft in the western most of these tombs that led to a tunnel which in turn led to a three chambers actually located under the southwest corner of the king's pyramid. Fragments of a canopic jar found within this tomb bore the name of Khnumetneferhedjetweret (Weret II), who was the wife of Senusret II and the mother of Senusret III.  See also "Queens and Princesses in the Pyramid Complex of Senwosret III, Dahshur". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 2004).

** Egyptologists generally agree that such scenes cluttered with figures and hieroglyphs are characteristic of the goldsmith's art under Amenemhat III, indicating a slight decline in the goldsmith's art. There's certainly something crowded in the composition, at least to our eyes; but would Mereret have agreed with us?  I rather suspect not.  

*** Stone maceheads already appear in female burials in the Predynastic period.  A study of 100 Predynastic burials with mace heads indicated that the weapons were more common in the graves of males but not at all rare in female graves.  Given the unreliability of sex determination in early excavations, we should be cautious (although the sex bias probably lies in the other direction).  However, three such burials appear quite certain: Predynastic Naqada 1488 with two stone mace heads; 1401 with three stone mace heads and a flint knife; and 1417 with a decorated limestone mace head and several flint knives.  For references, see Dean in Sources, below; for maces in Predynastic graves, see Stevenson in Sources, below.

Sources: Besides the book under review, I have made especial use of M.M. Luiselli, "The Ancient Egyptian Scene of 'Pharaoh Smiting his Enemies': an attempt to visualize cultural memory".  In (M. Bommas, ed.) Cultural Memory and Identity in Ancient Societies, 10-25;  R. Dean, Women, Weaponry and Warfare in Ancient Egypt: A Brief Examination of Available Evidence ; A. Stevenson, Alice, 'Mace',  UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology.  On the exciting new topic of the fluid genders of the dead, see H.L. McCarthy, 'The Osiris Nefertari: A Case Study of Decorum, Gender and regeneration,' Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 39 (2002), 173-195; and the trio of papers by K. Cooney, which she so kindly sent me: 'Gender Transformation in Death' Near Eastern Archaeology 73.4 (2010) 224-237; 'Where does the Masculine Begin and the Feminine End?' In (B. Heininger, ed.) Ehrenmord und Emanzipation, 99-124; and 'The Problem of Female Rebirth in New Kingdom Egypt', In (C. Graves-Brown, ed.), Sex and Gender in Ancient Egypt: "Don your Wig for a Joyful Hour", 1-25. 

Tomb Treasures of the Late Middle Kingdom:

The Archaeology of Female Burials

By Wolfram Grajetzki

University of Pennsylvania Press

E-ISBN-13: 9780812209198
E-ISBN-10: 0812209192
Print-ISBN-13: 9780812245677
Page Count: 288
106 illus.
Publication Year: 2013


Illustrations

Top: Pyramid complex of Sensuret III in Dahshur. Copyright © 2000-2014 Dariusz Sitek, Czestochowa - Chicago-Ann Arbor.

Upper left: Plan of the underground galleries of the pyramid complex of Sensuret III.  Credit: W. Grajetzki, from the book under review, p. 83, Fig. 65.

Middle left: Canopic jars of Princess Sithathor .  Photo credit: Egypt, The pyramid of Sensuret II at Dahshur.

Upper centre: Pectoral of Sithathor with the throne name of Senusret II in central cartouche.  Photo credit: Sergiothirteen on the Ancient Egyptian Jewellery Flickr group.

Lower left 1: I cheated: this photograph is actually of the restrung djed-pillar bracelets of Queen Weret II (A. Oppenheim, "Queens and Princesses in the Pyramid Complex of Senwosret III, Dahshur". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 2004).  The similar bracelets belonging to Sithathor were in deplorable condition with scattered beads and only the djed-pillar clasps intact.

Middle centre: Pectoral of Mereret with the throne name of Amenemhat III.  Photo credit:


Lower left 2: A rounded pear form of mace head known as a "piriform" used throughout the Naqada III period (3250-3100 BC).  Photo credit: Tour Egypt net.

Lower left 3: Girdle of Mereret, gold and amethyst, length 60 cm.  Cairo Museum JE 30879 - 30923 (CG 53075). Photo credit: Tour Egypt. 

Below centre: Was sceptres from the tomb of Senebtisi, Lisht North, Tomb of Senwosret (758), Pit 763, MMA 1906–1907.  Photo credit:  Metropolitan Museum of Art,  Rogers Fund, 1908;  Accession Number: 08.200.51.

Lower left 4: Collar and beaded flail from burial of Princess Nefruptah, daughter of Ameemhat III,  in Hawara.  Photo credit  sergiothirteen on Flickr.

Bottom left: Colossol statue from Coptos showing the god Min engendering his own creation. Ca. 3200 BCE. Ashmolean Museum 1994.105e.  Photo credit: Katherine Wodehouse (via K.M. Cooley, 'Gender Transformation in Death' (see Sources), Fig. 1.