Volume 2, Number 5 · April 16, 1964
Alsop's Archaeology
By M.I. Finley
From the Silent Earth
by Joseph Alsop
Harper & Row, 296 pp., $7.50
Ever since Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans opened up the Bronze Age of Greece, a whole network of interesting and complex historical problems have been debated. Then came the announcement in 1952 of Michael Ventris's unexpected discovery that Greek was the language of most of the clay tablets found in Cnossus, Mycenae, and Pylos, those inscribed near the end of the Bronze Age in the cumbersome script which Evans called Linear B. That was surprise number one. The content of the short texts provided the second surprise, for they revealed a highly centralized, highly bureaucratic would, in which the palace apparently controlled, managed and duly recorded all the operations of the society, from sheep-farming and land allocation to manufacture and war and religious sacrifice. There were parallels in the Near East at the time, but nothing like it ever recurred in ancient Greece after the Bronze-Age civilization was destroyed, nor did the later Greeks have even the dimmest memory of such a past.
Review, 2044 words
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