The debate concerning the date of the texts written in the Linear B script excavated by Arthur Evans at the site of Knossos on Crete, principally in a building that he identified as a palace, has a history of over 65 years. Recovered in large quantities in the form of mostly fragmentary clay tablets baked in one or more destructive fires, these documents were found chiefly during Evans’ first four years of excavation. The Linear B script was deciphered by Michael Ventris as an early form of Greek in 1953, and in 1958 Carl Blegen initiated the controversy over the Knossian tablets’ date that continues till this day.[1] Hallager’s contribution to the debate indicates that archaeologists as well as palaeographers and philologists continue to disagree on this basic question in the absence of compelling evidence from more recent excavations clarifying how the original evidence recovered by Sir Arthur Evans should be interpreted.
Birgitta Hallager is a veteran expert on the history and development of Late Minoan [LM] pottery, the chief artifactual category used for dating other, less commonly found items of material culture. She has been the LM pottery specialist over the past five decades for the Helleno-Swedish excavations at the major Minoan site under the modern city of Chania (ancient Kydonia), the only site on Crete other than Knossos that has so far yielded Linear B tablets. At Chania, these are securely dated by the LM IIIB pottery with which they have consistently been found. In her preface, she observes that, “In the literature dealing with Knossos, no one has investigated the full extent of its LM IIIB ceramic evidence — including not only the palace but also its surrounding houses, its town and cemeteries.” She therefore proposes “to investigate this neglected subject in order to find out if it could be correct that there is no evidence for an extensive LM IIIB settlement at Knossos, and to examine the date of the latest pottery found in its destroyed palace.”
Hallager’s focus on the LM IIIB period is fully realized in sections devoted to the evidence from the palace, the houses surrounding the palace, and the tombs (see Table of Contents below). An additional section on the evidence for “relations” between Knossos and Chania/Kydonia is devoted to Knossian LM IIIB ceramic imports identified from findspots in Chania and examples of the distinctive “Kydonian Workshop” class imported to Knossos, along with a short review of mentions of Kydonia in the Knossian Linear B tablets. A short conclusion summarizes all the significant findings previously reviewed and ends with a brief consideration of how problematic determining the date of the latest LM IIIB pottery recovered at Knossos continues to be, due to the incomplete state of publication of a number of excavations in areas outside of the palace.
It is helpful to have a single publication in which a systematic review of where pottery datable to the LM IIIB period is reported to have been found in the palace as well as in other buildings at Knossos in which Linear B tablets have been found (the Little Palace and the Arsenal). It is clear from what Hallager as well as others have reported that only a very small fraction of the pottery recovered during Evans’ first four seasons of excavation in the palace has been retained. The significance of the comparatively few LM IIIB pieces that can be assigned a provenience within that enormous structure, continuously refurbished over at least four centuries during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1650–1250 BCE), is therefore limited. It could be claimed that every LM IIIB sherd that can be assigned to a specific room is evidence for that space’s use during that period. But in the absence of detailed stratigraphic information as to recovery context, such a contention would lack credibility. To associate specific tablets with particular sherds would require even more in the way of stratigraphic information, rarely recorded at the beginning of the 20th century. The progress made in the past 35 years by palaeographers on the development of the Linear B script strongly suggests that the surviving tablets from the palace are relics of multiple destructive episodes of part or all of it by up to three, and possibly more, fires that would have baked groups of tablets during the roughly two centuries during which the Linear B script may have been employed at Knossos for administrative records.[2] In contrast, ceramic specialists have thus far been unable to identify stratigraphically based subdivisions of the LM IIIB ceramic phase at Knossos.[3] Thus even if one were able to identify a closed context with tablets and LM IIIB pottery (as has been done at Chania on several occasions since 1989), it would be difficult to date such a context closely within a period lasting between 100 and 125 years. Moreover at Chania, the only site on Crete where two ceramic sub-phases identified as LM IIIB:1 and LM IIIB:2 have been well defined and universally accepted, it has recently been suggested that the second of these sub-phases is likely to be contemporary with an early sub-phase of LH IIIC, as a late stage of LM IIIB has been claimed to be also at other sites on Crete.[4]
Hallager’s detailed review of the LM IIIB pottery from the Knossian palace strongly suggests that the primary function of the building at this late stage was the storage of enormous quantities of agricultural staples in both long-term storage and shorter-lived shipping containers. The largest of the former were mostly pithoi, many of which had been in use for centuries and are thus not helpful for dating the final usage of the spaces in which they were found. But the same is not true for the masses of decorated transport stirrup jars (TSJs, some bearing short, pre-firing dipinti texts in Linear B, thus ISJs) and plain rim-handled amphoras. Sadly, the vast majority of these transport vessels, including essentially all of the plain ones, were discarded during Evans’ excavations. Less than 30 of the TSJs recovered at Knossos have been included in the largest published study of such vessels, not all of them from the palace, nor all necessarily of LM IIIB date.[5] Considerable attention has been focused recently on pots serving this function (so-called Maritime Transport Containers [MTCs]), particularly to determine where such vessels were produced, when each of these production centers flourished, and which sites throughout the eastern and central Mediterranean may have played significant roles in the exchange of such containers.[6] Future petrological and trace element analyses of such vessels from contexts in the palace or in the town could reveal how such shipping containers might be dated as well as provenienced, and thus have at least as much to say about Knossos during the LM IIIB period as the relatively small quantities of LM IIIB decorated tablewares recovered from known contexts in the palace.
Plain pottery, whether fine or coarse, understandably attracts only minor attention from Hallager, since comparatively little of it was retained by early excavators. Increased future attention to such material might yield interesting results. The petrological work of Stavroula Fouriki and Eleni Nodarou on a broad range of ceramic types from LM IIIA:1 to LM IIIB:2 contexts at Chania has shown that the analytical profiles of pottery from that site are impressively varied. The so-called “Kydonian Workshop”’s products are as distinctive petrographically as they are stylistically. But it appears that plain conical cups, still a very common ceramic type in the Final Palatial era, were not produced by the “Kydonian Workshop,” while the most common imported plain shapes appear to have been south Cretan rather than Knossian imports and to have taken the form of transport vessels.[7] Expanding attention beyond decorated pottery exchanged between Chania and Knossos (Hallager’s focus on pp. 159–168) might reveal quite a different picture if plain wares were analyzed in greater numbers so as to provide a better understanding of intra-Cretan ceramic exchanges during the 13th century BCE.
Despite all the fieldwork done at Knossos in the palace, the surrounding town, and the site’s various cemeteries over the past 125 years, no satisfactory subdivisions of the LM IIIB ceramic phase are yet warranted by the surviving pottery in Hallager’s opinion. Future publication of better stratified evidence from the site may well yield a more persuasive date for the palace’s fiery final destruction than the estimate of ca. 1270–1250 BCE that she tepidly suggests in her brief concluding chapter.
Notes
[1] Hallager provides a short history of what she terms “the Knossian controversy” on pp. 9–10, with a footnote to fuller accounts of it by Erik Hallager (1977) and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier (1982). For an updated treatment of the debate’s history, see Todd Whitelaw, “Knossos during LM II-IIIB: Dynamism and Development,” in A.L. D’Agata, L. Girella, E. Papadopoulou, and D.G. Aquini (eds.), One State, Many Worlds: Crete in the Late Minoan II-IIIA2 Early Period. Proceedings of the International Conference held at Chania, Μεγαλο Αρσεναλι, 21st–23rd November 2019 (Rome 2022) 35–70, esp. 38–48, figs. 3–5, 7–8.
[2] Whitelaw in n.1 above, citing the work of Skelton (2008), Skelton and Firth (2016), Firth and Skelton (2016a, 2016b), and Driessen (1997, 2008) on pp. 40–42, figs. 3–4.
[3] Hallager admits this on pp. 172–173 in a single brief paragraph on this important topic. For the LM IIIB ceramic phase on Crete generally, see C. Langohr (ed.), How Long is a Century? Late Minoan IIIB Pottery. Relative Chronology and Regional Differences (Louvain 2017), esp. E. Hatzaki, “To Be or Not to Be in LM IIIB Knossos” (pp. 53–77), C. Langohr, “The Late Minoan IIIB Phase on Crete. The State of Play and Future Perspectives” (pp. 11–35), and the Chronological Table (p. 398).
[4] J.B. Rutter, “LM IIIB Ceramic Regionalism and Chronological Correlations with LH IIIB-C Phases on the Greek Mainland,” in R. Jung and E. Kardamaki (eds.), Synchronizing the Destructions of the Mycenaean Palaces (Vienna 2022) 209–230, esp. 214–223.
[5] H.W. Haskell, R.E. Jones, P.M. Day, and J.T. Killen, Transport Stirrup Jars of the Bronze Age Aegean and East Mediterranean [INSTAP Prehistory Monographs 33] (Philadelphia 2011), 139–140, KN02–KN03, KN05–KN07, KN09–KN13, KN15, KN19–KN36. Only eight or nine of these 29 examples have secure proveniences within the palace, and just five can be described as intact or nearly complete.
[6] A.B. Knapp and S. Demesticha (eds.), Maritime Transport Containers and Seaborne Trade in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages (New York/London 2016); C.E. Pratt, “The Rise and Fall of the Transport Stirrup Jar in the Bronze Age Aegean,” American Journal of Archaeology 120 (2016) 27–66; E. Kardamaki, P.M. Day, M. Tenconi, J. Maran, and A. Papadimitriou, “Transport Stirrup Jars in Late Mycenaean Tiryns: Maritime Transport Containers and Commodity Movement in Political Context,” in S. Demesticha and A.B. Knapp (eds.), Maritime Transport Containers in the Bronze-Iron Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean [SIMA-PB 183] (Uppsala 2016) 145–167; C.E. Pratt, Oil, Wine, and the Cultural Economy of Ancient Greece: From the Bronze Age to the Archaic Era (Cambridge 2021).
[7] S. Fouriki and E. Nodarou, “Pottery Traditions in Kydonia: Preliminary Results from the Petrographic Analysis of Three Pottery Assemblages in Chania,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 48 (2023) #103863 (1–6); see also S. Fouriki, “Petrographic Analysis of Cooking Ware from Late Bronze Age Khania (LM IB–IIIB), Crete, ca. 1525–1200 BCE: Preliminary Results on Technology and Provenance,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 34 (2020) #102646 (1–8).