From Middle Assyrian to Mycenean Archives. Some comparative and theoretical considerations on the economic and political elites of a Mycenean polity

This paper is aimed at comparing the economic and administrative activity of the Mycenaean personnel (collectors, shepherds, and nomenclature personnel) with that of their Middle-Assyrian “colleagues” (stewards, flockmasters, qēpu, etc.) from Tel Ali, Tel Shekh-Hammad, and from the “Steward Archive” of Assur. Notwithstanding obvious differences, these archives share the same chronology (XIV-XIII centuries B.C.) and the same typology of documentation (internal memoranda); further, they are concerned with the same economic topics (husbandry, textile industry, agriculture), and with very similar historical, hierarchical, and administrative problems (centre vs. periphery, palace elites vs. local elites, “private” interests vs. “public” interests). Through a strictly comparative analysis, we endeavor to propose some new ideas as regards the long-standing question of the Mycenaean “collectors”, and especially the complex relations between them and the Palace taking into account the new data stemming from the recent publications on the Petsas House at Mycenae. We shall also discuss the theoretical models which have been most recently applied in Mycenaean studies. Since the publication of the volume “Rethinking Mycenaean Palaces”, a new theoretical and methodological approach has been developed so as to change the prevailing ideas about the Mycenaean “state”. Instead of the old, well-established concept of a centralized, highly hierarchized and bureaucratic Mycenaean “state”, most scholars today adopt a more contextualized model of political entities (or “polities”): different elites compete for power in a complex system of economic, political, military and territorial equilibria involving both the internal (regional) and the external (inter-regional) life of the Mycenaean chiefdoms. For better understanding and completing the piecemeal picture of the Mycenaean polities which can be drawn from the Mycenaean Linear B tablets, the most recent theoretical approaches largely adopted the concept of devolution; recently, it was applied to all aspects of the Mycenaean “official” life, from the economic to the political devolution, and to some form of ideological devolution. This is not necessarily a problem; but if this new tendency is compared with the same theoretical phenomenon which has already taken place in other disciplines, like Ancient Near Eastern Studies, it can be easily deduced that what is “happening” to the Mycenaean polities has already occurred in their Near Eastern counterparts. In his recent volume “Immaginare Babele” M. Liverani stresses that at the end of the same theoretical course the Near Eastern polities (!) have been understood as “unrealistic, incomplete, defective realization of an aspiration to the total control”: many Mycenologists would certainly be inclined to use this definition for describing the Aegean polities. Upon these premises, the final aim of this paper is to draw a comparison between the Middle-Assyrian and Mycenaean archives for discussing a very pervasive and successful model which was recently adopted in Mycenaean studies as an innovation, but is being heavily criticized by contemporary scholars of the Ancient Near East.