The Inner Workings of Mycenaean Bureaucracy. Proceedings of the International Colloquium University of Kent, Canterbury, 19-21 September 2008

Individuals (or atoms), those that cannot be divided any further, are the building blocks of the world as we conceive it. Both words refer to what cannot be divided and usually denote the bricks and mortar of the social or material worlds respectively. Their study has fascinated many since the dawn of philosophy. The narrative of the social sciences has revolved around epistemological, ontological and ethical debates on the nature and role of the individual in polities and societes.

This volume aims to bring together scholars working on Linear B, and for comparison a few working on Linear A, who use the information on individuals in their work. They employ knowledge from many different disciplines, including epigraphy, linguistics, textual analysis, archaeology, biology, statistics, forensics, history, sociology, economics and others, in order to clarify the role of individuals in Mycenaean bureaucracies. Alongside more traditional topics, such as the epigraphy or the study of a particular sector of the economy, the contributions to this volume also focus on more novel themes, such as the existence of formal legal or quasi-legal agreements, scribal training, the relationship with preceding bureaucracies, and the spheres of administrative control of a state, of a group of individuals or of a single scribe. When these various perspectives are taken into account, Linear B tablets not only help us reconstruct individual scribes, but also the dividuality of those persons. Amongst other things, we gain insights into their human relationships, their specialisations, their language use and way of writing, and their places of work. Moreover, the tablets themselves can in many ways be seen as extra-body tools for storing beliefs and information, parts of the cognitive apparatus that contribute to the composition of the individuals who wrote and used them. As such they also contribute to our understanding of the persons who wrote them.