A drop of soul amidst the clay - cognitive aspects of Mycenaean archives and archival texts

Thesis

This thesis is located in the borderlands between cognition, culture and language. It asks the question of how Bronze Age people were thinking and how their cognitive processes were reflected in and enacted through their written texts and the physical reality of their archives. Building upon previous insights about Linear B, the thesis focuses on the aspect of order of and in the tablets. Results from the structural analysis of the texts are connected to insights from cognitive science and Cognitive Linguistics. Our central example is the Mycenaean palace of Pylos in Southern Greece that was destroyed in a fire around 1200 BC. The Linear B texts found in the palace are carrier of written language and material object at the same time. Written on clay, they are our most direct evidence for Mycenaean cognition. Two tablet series, each related to a different area of the Mycenaean culture, were selected as case studies: the Ta series, which describes Mycenaean feasting paraphernalia, and the E series, which treats the topic of landholding. An analysis of the tablets agrees with the long-established knowledge in Mycenology that the texts follow a very rigid structure. The thesis hypothesizes that this structure is reflective of wider cognitive patterns called ‘frames’. ‘Frames’ or ‘schemata’ according to modern approaches in linguistics are cognitively grounded and intersubjectively shared. The thesis argues that the Linear B texts display a tight intertwining of cognition, written language and material object. The use of pre-structured patterns of knowledge that are reflected in the repetitive character of the texts enabled the Mycenaean scribes to use manifold abbreviations and still convey a vast amount of information. In the Mycenaean Greek texts, linguistic knowledge and world knowledge become inseparable. As such, the ability to form and perceive patterns should be seen as a prerequisite for the implicit nature of the Linear B texts and writing more generally. These patterns of thought extended to the cultural world as transmitted in the archaeological record (e.g. iconography) and the physical space of the archive and archival assemblages of the Mycenaean palaces where tablets were ordered according to similarity and contiguity.

Authors: Mann, MKE

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-mv0manxdr
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: cognitive linguistics; frame theory; Linear B; cognitive archaeology; Pylos
• Subjects: Bronze age--Greece; Archaeology; Linguistics