This seminar course is designed to introduce students to the potential of interdisciplinary studies focusing on the association between archaeology and language. Mycenaean data of different kinds (e.g. architecture, iconography, political geography, frescoes etc.) are examined under the light of the contemporary Linear B script, while comparisons are promoted with regard to analogies from the Minoan world or special fields of knowledge, such as the Aegean scripts, Homeric Studies, New Archaeology, Mediterranean cross-cultural comparisons, anthropological approaches and Indo-European studies. By the end of the semester, students are acquainted with the interpretative range of the attempted associations, certain key issues of Aegean Prehistory (society, religion, economy, ceremony) as well as ways of formulating new questions, while dealing with the inconclusive or the pending issues of actual research.
- An introduction to Mycenology for Archaeologists: The history of the research before and after the middle of the 20th c. The decipherment of the Linear B script: its history and its impact on Aegean Studies.
- Basic rules of Linear B phonology, morphology and syntax. Discussing problems of transliteration. Practicing transliteration.
- The Mycenaean world in the light of the surviving written evidence: the society, the armoury and the army, the institutions, goods and crops, feasts and ceremonies, the gods, systems of accounting. Assessing the written evidence as a source of historical inference.
- Examining Mycenaean institutions under the light of relevant archaeological data and scriptural evidence, e.g. the nature of the Mycenaean wa-na-ka, the nature of po-ti-ni-ja.
- Comparing logos with image: assessing congruity and divergence between the linguistic and the material realms of representation.