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The Mycenaean World by John Chadwick5/24/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() While we can reconstruct some aspects of Mycenaean life, however, the practice of writing itself is much harder to understand from the surviving evidence. They are almost entirely bureaucratic in nature, originating from large centralised complexes (“palaces”) and recording the personnel and commodities that the central administration wanted to keep tabs on. Dating from the 15th to the end of the 13th C BC, the archives of clay documents written in Linear B are the earliest surviving records written in the Greek language. The book The Mycenaean World was published in 1976 and intended as an accessible description of what we know about life in the Mycenaean palaces based on the Linear B documents deciphered and read in the 1950s by Michael Ventris (in collaboration with John Chadwick). Here is the original painting by Henry Hankey, made especially for John Chadwick’s book: ![]() Far from a just-for-fun exercise, this actually has some helpful practical applications in making us question what Mycenaean scribes did at work, and how Linear B archives functioned. Happy International Lego Classicism Day to all our friends and colleagues! In celebration this year, I have been working on something special: a re-imagining of the cover art from John Chadwick’s The Mycenaean World book, in a 3D Lego model. ![]()
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