The added value textile hypothesis

Otherwise known as the "weaving a large polychrome textile is not feasible for me, so let's think outside that box" hypothesis.

Most studies of patterned Minoan and Mycenaean textiles tend to focus on textiles with patterns woven into them, because weaving does seem to have been an important method of producing patterned textiles.  The weaving techniques used involved brocades made with supplementary threads, and probably also tapestry.  But weaving is only one of several ways to create patterned cloth, and in fact we know from the Linear B evidence that textiles frequently had decorative elements applied after they were woven.

The reason for this is that not all textiles were woven on-site at the palace administrative centers, and the weavers had a range of different skill levels.  Woven fabric came from a variety of sources, because in the Bronze Age taxes were paid in labour or in commodities like cloth.  Polychrome weaving demands a very high level of technical ability, especially for the kind of designs attested on Aegean frescoes, and quality could not be guaranteed when the weaving process happened outside the palace.  The solution was to get weavers to produce plain cloth and then decorate it using a separate finishing process at the palace, where quality could be assured.

Presumably cloth woven at Knossos and other palace sites was made by specialists and involved advanced techniques, such as brocaded patterns.

The process of adding value to plain cloth was carried out by specialised workers listed in the Linear B tablets. Men were employed as fullers, while a-ka-te-ri-ja and o-nu-ke-ja were women whose job was to decorate finished cloth.  o-nu-ke (onukhes probably) literally means fingernails or claws, but in a textile context it means wool-based decorative elements applied to cloth.  It may therefore be the Mycenaean term for embroidery, or perhaps fringed trim applied to garments.

Embroidery was used across Europe and the Near East in the Bronze Age.  Considering Greece's extensive trade links with the Near East, and the influence of Near Eastern traditions on Greek textile production known from the first millennium, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect Near Eastern-type embroidery in Greece.

Interestingly, one of the Akrotiri frescoes shows a piece of cloth decorated with dashed lines that may indicate running stitch.  However, these dashed lines may also represent carnelian beads.

Image from the Ancient History Encyclopedia

Textiles decorated with beads and other sewn-on ornaments appear to have been popular.  Large numbers of small gold foil shapes, like these ones from Mycenae, have been found in Mycenaean tombs.  They appear to have been sewn on to textiles, and would be a very effective way to add value to plain fabric.

Image from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Another method of adding value to plain textiles, which is clearly shown in Minoan and Mycenaean art, is the use of decorative bands and fringes.  The women on the Aghia Triada sarcophagus (pictured below) wear dresses made of plain cloth, ornamented with with coloured bands which appear to have been sewn onto the finished garment.  These bands could be fairly ornate, like the one from Tyrins I copied a couple of years ago.  Making and applying such bands may have been the job of the workers known as o-nu-ke-ja (onukheiai).

Image of the Aghia Triada sarcophagus from Wikimedia.

Evans also suggested the possibility that Minoan and Mycenaean textiles may have been painted or block printed.  There are, in fact, examples of painted textiles from ancient Egypt, but these appear to have been associated with funerary contexts rather than clothing for living people.

It's not entirely clear whether this sort of added value process also characterised the Minoan textile production model.  Minoan textile production didn't operate in exactly the same way as the Mycenaean system reflected in the Linear B archives, but the scholarly consensus is that the Mycenaean system developed from the earlier Minoan model.  When the Mycenaeans took over Crete, they simply used and adapted the infrastructure that was already in place.  Therefore, the two systems had a number of similarities, particularly in the sense that cloth was delivered to the administrative centers but not necessarily made there.

The Minoan system appears to have been a little less centralised, meaning cloth was even less likely to have been made in a palace workshop staffed by experts.  However, the Minoans had extensive international trade networks, beginning around 2700 BCE.  It's reasonable to expect this trade included textiles which would have needed to meet a consistent quality standard, so the assumption that Minoan cloth sometimes started life plain and was finished at Knossos is consistent with our understanding of Minoan textile production.

I don’t wish to downplay the importance of patterned weaving in the Minoan and Mycenaean textile industries.  There’s plenty of evidence to show it was important.  What I’m saying is that when we consider the Linear B texts it becomes clear weaving was not the only method used to create patterned textiles, and therefore it is not the only method we should consider when trying to reconstruct Bronze Age textiles.


References

Abdel-Kareem, O. et al.  2008.  "Conservation of a Rare Painted Ancient Egyptian Textile Object from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo".  e-PreservationScience 5, 9-16.

Alberti, M. E.  2007.  "The Minoan Textile Industry and the Territory from Neopalatial to Mycenaean Times: Some First Thoughts".  Creta Antica 8.  243.

Barber, E.  1991.  Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean.  Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.

Casson, L.  1991.  The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in Ancient Times (2nd edition).  Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.

Evans, A.  1921.  The Palace of Minos.  London: MacMillan & co.  You can download it here.

Gleba, M.  2017.  "Tracing textile cultures of Italy and Greece in the early first millennium BC".  Antiquity, Volume 91, Issue 359, pp. 1205-1222  Available here.

Immerwahr, S. A. 1990. Aegean Painting in the Bronze Age. University Park (PA): The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Laffineur, R. & Betancourt, P. P. (eds) 1997.  TEXNH: Craftsmen, Craftswomen, and Craftsmanship in the Aegean Bronze Age.  Philadelphia: Temple University.

Nosch, M. L. 2014 "The Aegean Wool Economies of the Bronze Age". Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings. 900.  http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/900

Nosch, M. L. (ed)  2014.  Prehistoric,  Ancient Near Eastern, and Aegean Textiles and Dress.  Oxford: Oxbow Books Limited.

 Nosch, M.L. & Laffineur, R. (eds)  2012.  KOSMOS: Jewellery, Adornment, and Textiles in the Aegean Bronze Age.  Leuven: Peeters Publishers.

Nosch, M. L. & Gillis, C. (eds)  2007.  Ancient Textiles: Production, Crafts and Society.  Oxford: Oxbow Books Limited.

Ortiz-Garcia, J.  2017.  "Painting on Linen Cloth in Antiquity: Shrouds from Roman Egypt as a Source for Research".  Textile: Cloth and Cultutre, Volume 15, Issue 1, pp. 34-47.

Ventriss, M. & Chadwick, J.  1959.  Documents in Mycenaean Greek.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Or download it here.

Finished shaft grave helmet

Here it is folks, the shaft grave helmet is all done.  Sorry it's taken me so long to get this post up; life gets in the way sometimes.

This helmet was much easier to make than my last beehive helmet, and definitely faster, mainly because this time I had a better idea of what I was doing.  Otherwise it's fundamentally the same thing as my Phaistos helmet; the differences in shape and style are largely superficial although, as I'll explain, I do think the shaft grave style would offer better head protection.

So how historically accurate is it?  That depends on how correct our understanding of beehive helmets is, which we don't know for sure.  Unfortunately we don't have any surviving Mycenaean helmets to study, so any reconstruction necessarily involves some conjecture.  Based on art, literature, and archaeological finds it is possible to make deductions about how Mycenaean helmets were made and what materials they were made from, and I like to think this is a reasonable reconstruction based on the evidence available.

Here's what the shaft grave helmet looks like when worn:

Selfies are acceptable for research and/or educational purposes.

As you can see there's a lot of bulk in the helmet to cushion my skull in the event of an enemy hitting me over the head with a blunt object, or firing a sling stone at me.  Even at the lower edge of the helmet, which is its thinnest point, there's a good inch and a quarter (30mm) of padding and tough leather.

Although my shaft grave helmet is the same basic construction as the Phaistos helmet, I think it would do a slightly better better job of protecting the wearer's skull because of the extra padding.  Helmets made this way are naturally thinner around the lower edge, and placing curved pieces of leather stuffed with linen around the lower edge is one way to increase the level of protection the helmet provides in this area.

This is the internal structure of my Phaistos helmet.  You can clearly see how the thick bundle of leather strips at the top gives more protection than the lower rim, which is just one layer of leather.  Adding extra padding around this area makes sense.

Assembling the shaft grave helmet

Nearly complete shaft grave helmet, with its outer shell in place.

At this point the helmet looks finished, and it nearly is, but it doesn't yet have a felt liner.  Just like the Phaistos helmet, the leather components are stitched together with strong linen thread.  The joins are covered in red felt, which acts a little like a gasket and hides any places where the joins are a bit scruffy.

In this case the helmet shell consists of a conical top piece, and two curved cylinders studded with metal discs and stuffed with linen (see my first post on the shaft grave helmet for a cross sectional diagram).  I had a long think about whether I should glue the linen and then decided not to.  Aldrete et al, who quite literally wrote the book on linen armour, found the linen layers didn't necessarily have to be glued together.  The important thing is that you have a lot of layers of springy stuff to absorb the impact of any blows you receive.  Schlieman did recover a small fragment of linen armour from shaft grave V, which consisted of 14 layers and may have been part of a linothorax, but I don't know whether the layers had been glued or not.  It may not have been possible to tell.  Greece really does not provide good conditions for the preservation of organic material; even the skeletons in the shaft graves were not very complete.

In any case I found it was easy enough just to stuff the linen in there, so this helmet is padded with layers of unglued linen strips.

Helmet shell with linen padding inside.

Where the stitching holes are visible I've made them the historical way, with an awl, but many of the holes are covered by felt binding so I cheated on those and used a metal punch.  This is a punch designed to make holes in steel plate, and it is the easiest way of making holes in armour leather.  It's not historically accurate, but I find by the time I've bored a few dozen holes in 5mm armour leather with an awl I don't really care.  If you look closely at the holes it is possible to see they were made with a punch, so I do make sure I only use it on holes that will be covered.

The holes you can see here were made with an awl.

A note about the metal studs you can see in these pictures: they are made from a modern ferrous alloy instead of bronze, but they look like bronze age helmet studs.  They're fixed to the leather with a pin in the back.  Studs like these have been found in bronze age burials, but I'm not aware of any studs with pins from the Mycenaean shaft graves.  There are small bronze discs that may have been used to reinforce helmets, but they have perforations around the edges and were sewn onto whatever they were attached to.  Assuming they were helmet reinforcements, this makes me wonder whether the helmet shell might have been covered in linen (or other textile), with the discs sewn onto that.  It would even be possible to make the shell for one of these helmets entirely out of laminated linen instead of leather.

Shaft grave helmet: shaping

I made a core for the shaft grave helmet in much the same way as I did for the Phaistos helmet, except that this one has the leather strips tied around a bundle of horse hair.  This version went together much easier than the Phaistos one, because now I have a better idea of what I'm doing.  Notice how the bundle of strips at the top is sewn together?  The strips have holes in them and there's a length of strong linen thread twined through the holes.  This is important.  Just tying the leather strips together like a bundle of sticks doesn't work very well because the thread is inclined to slide upwards and pop off the top, and then you're back to square one.  Only the outer ring of strips need to be sewn; they keep all the other strips in place.

See how those strips are sewn together?

Now it's time for me to make the leather shell.  The curved padding around the bottom of this helmet will be made from leather stuffed with linen.  These pieces are simply long strips that have been shaped to form curved ridges.  As I've discussed before on this blog, veg-tanned armour leather can be soaked in hot water and then moulded.

In this photo the pieces have been soaked, curved, and stretched.  But as you can see, they're still not quite the right shape.  The edges don't curve inward all that well.  Even when softened, there's a limit to how much armour leather will stretch.

These edges don't curve nicely.

The solution is to notch the leather the way you would notch a curved seam on a garment.  I've cut small notches along the edges of the pieces, then soaked and shaped them again.  Now they fit around the helmet base much better.

These edges do curve nicely, even at the top where the curve is fairly steep.

I found it's important to cut the notches from the wrong side of the leather.  That way they end up being slightly smaller on the right side, and when you soak and shape them again they'll close up nicely.

Notice how the notches are a little wider on the inside than on the outside.  The notches should not be large - these are about 7mm long by 3mm wide.

Next time: assembling the helmet shell.

It's helmet time again!

Thanks to the magical carnival of capitalism that is Ebay, I've managed to acquire some horsehair.  And that means it's time for another beehive helmet, with a plume on top.

This time I'm reconstructing a helmet shown on a ring from Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae.  It's a very similar style to the Phaistos helmet, but with extra padding around the lower edge.

Notice how these helmets have what look like horizontal ridges around the bottom.  This is not unusual with the earlier beehive helmets and likely represents strips of leather that have been padded with either linen or wool, to provide extra protection.  The padded leather has been further reinforced with circular metal attachments.  Because of the way beehive helmets are constructed they're naturally thinner at the bottom, so it makes sense to put a bit of extra protection in this area.

Image from Bensozia

The following doodle illustrates what I think we're looking at here:

Blue lines represent the inner core of the helmet, and black lines represent the outer shell.  You can see where there's space for extra padding between the core and the shell.

The archaeological record tells us a lot about what a Mycenaean's helmet had to protect him from, and why a good thick helmet was desirable.

Head injuries, particularly blunt force ones, seem to have been common on Mycenaean battlefields.  We don't have a lot of skulls from Bronze Age Greece, but a number of the ones we do have show evidence of combat injuries and some had undergone trepanation surgery.  This would have been done to treat intracranial pressure caused by a blow to the skull, or to remove splinters of bone from a head injury.

The reason these people sustained blunt force head injuries is that they were, quite literally, hitting each other over the head with hammers.  This is a stone hammer from 1525-1450 BCE.  It is about 10cm long and would have been fixed to a wooden handle.

Hammer-head from Zakros.

Other weapons likely to cause head injuries were maces, axes, and slingshots.  Early Mycenaean swords were designed for thrusting or stabbing and would not usually have been a source of head injuries, but as we've seen there were many ways to sustain head injuries on a Mycenaean battlefield.

My friend informs me that the ancient Hungarians also practiced trepanation.  They covered the hole in the skull with a metal plate to protect the brain, and had a surprisingly low incidence of infections.  And did you know that the Hungarian word for a smart person literally means "brain drilled"?



Sources discussing skulls and skull injuries

Alusik, T.  2015.  Skull Trepanations in Bronze Age Greece: An Archaeologist’s View.  World Neurosurgery, 84, 2:214-217.

Arnott, 1997.  Surgical Practice in the prehistoric Aegean, Medizinhistorisches Journal.  Band 32, Heft 3-4.

Castleden, R.  2005.  Mycenaeans.  Routledge: Oxon.

Papagrigorakis, M. J. et al, 2014.  Neurosurgery During the Bronze Age: A Skull Trepanation in 1900 BC Greece. World Neurosurgery, 81, 2:431-435.

Homeric kykeon

Kykeon (κυκεών in Greek) is a drink made from barley, herbs, and sometimes wine.  It was a popular everyday drink in Classical Greece, although it was considered a bit low-class.  There are a couple of different recipes for kykeon in ancient Greek texts, because it was mentioned in Greek mythology.  

This is undoubtedly one of the weirdest things I've ever consumed.  What's that white stuff in it, you ask?  Grated cheese, of course.

Kykeon made with barley and pennyroyal was a central component of the Eleusinian mysteries.  According to mythology the goddess Demeter consumed this drink to ease her grief at losing her daughter; pennyroyal can be used as a mild sedative.  During the Eleusinian religious festival humans consumed kykeon as part of the initiation process.  This kykeon obviously had some special additives not usually present in everyday versions of the drink, because the Eleusinian initiates' experiences show that it was psychoactive.  It's often suggested that Eleusinian kykeon may have contained ergot, but there are other psychoactive ingredients that were available in ancient Greece and could have been used.  

In the Iliad (XI, 638–641) and the Odysssey (X, 234), kykeon was made with wine and grated goat cheese as well as barley.  In the Iliad kykeon is served to Nestor and his companions, and in the Odyssey Circe gives it to Odysseus' men.  Of course, Circe's kykeon contains a drug which incapacitates the sailors and allows her to turn them into boars.  Some scholars probably interpret Circe's potion as a hallucinogen, but personally I don't see a need to rationalise the story into something that could have actually happened.

My kykeon is the Homeric kind, made with wine, and it most definitely doesn't contain ergot.  I like to think I'm a reasonably adventurous eater, but I have my limits.  

People who have made kykeon attest that the way to do it is to put all the ingredients in a pot and stir them together over a heat source, so that's what I did.  I cooked wine and barley flour on a low heat until the mixture thickened up, then I grated goat cheese over the top.  The cheese didn't melt, because goats' milk has a different protein structure to cows' milk and won't melt no matter what you do with it, but it did break apart into particles that mixed in with the kykeon.

The result was surprisingly palatable.  It smelled really good while it was cooking, and tasted mostly of wine with a little sweetness from the barley.  The grated cheese seems weird, but in fact it was quite good.


The Challenge: Myths and legends.

The Recipe: Wine and barley flour simmered together for 10 minutes, with grated cheese on top.

The Date/Year and Region: The Homeric epics were written down in the 8th or 7th century BCE, but they are set in the Late Bronze Age.  It's possible that the recipe dates back to the Late Bronze Age and I'm inclined to think it probably does, because the Iliad gives the recipe along with a very accurate and detailed description of Mycenaean furniture, but it's impossible to know for sure.

How Did You Make It: I put everything in a pot and simmered it for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

Time to Complete: Ten minutes.

Total Cost: All the ingredients were ones I already had on hand in my kitchen.

How Successful Was It? While it's definitely a strange concoction by 21st century standards, it wasn't at all unpleasant. 

How Accurate Is It? I cheated by using an electric stove and stainless steel saucepan.  Other than that, I followed the recipe in the Iliad, but it's difficult to say how closely my kykeon resembles the original in terms of consistency and flavour.  The Homeric epics specifically state Pramnian wine was used to make kykeon, so I chose a rich, dark, relatively sweet wine (Peter Yealand's 2014 Merlot - it's a nice wine and I recommend it), because apparently that's what Pramnian wine was like.

A little bit of fun

This fortnight's Historical Food Challenge is History Detective - "For this challenge, you get to be the detective! Either use clues from multiple recipes to make a composite recipe, or choose a very vague recipe and investigate how it was made".

Since it is barbecue season in this hemisphere I've researched ingredients known from Linear B texts and come up with two marinade recipes for grilled meat.  We know the Mycenaeans enjoyed grilled meat, and while we can't conclusively say whether they used marinades it's not an unreasonable assumption.

Beef with saffron and coriander, and lamb with mint and cumin.

We don't have any recipes from Mycenaean Greece, which is deeply unfortunate because they probably had quite a sophisticated cuisine.  We do know a bit about the kinds of food they ate, partly from archaeological remains, and partly because a lot of food products were recorded on Linear B tablets.  The staple food was grain, and workers were paid in grain; they might also get olive oil and figs.  There were a wide variety of domestic animals including cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats, although meat may have been a special occasion food for many people.  The elite got to enjoy a range of exciting spices, and probably a range of cooking techniques*.

Grilling meat on skewers the way modern Greeks make souvlaki was apparently common practice in Greece during the Bronze Age, and the Mycenaeans had a unique type of portable grill which archaeologists call a souvlaki tray.

Personally, I find the term "souvlaki tray" a bit misleading, because the meat wouldn't have tasted anything like modern souvlaki.  Souvlaki is made with lemon, which was not available in Greece at that time, and oregano, which may or may not have been available but is not attested in Linear B.  Based on the spices listed on Linear B tablets I would expect Mycenaean food to incorporate flavours we now associate with the Middle East, like cumin, mint and coriander.

Recipe 1 is flavoured with saffron and coriander, and I found it worked very well with beef.

Recipe 2 includes mint and cumin.  I used it to marinade lamb, and I think it might also be nice with pork.

The sign shaped like a T usually refers to a unit of weight equal to about 3 kilograms, but as Dr Richard Vallance has discussed this depends on context.  When it refers to spices it represents a much smaller quantity.  In these cases Vallance translates it as a gram (about a quarter teaspoon).  I've used it to refer to grams here, and I've also used it to represent mililiters, since a mililiter of liquid weighs close to a gram.  Mycenaean scribes sometimes did use weight measurements for liquids.

So here are the recipes in English:

Recipe 1

100mls red wine
50mls olive oil
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon cumin
Around 20 saffron threads

Recipe 2

100mls red wine
50mls olive oil
2 teaspoons chopped mint
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon cardamom

Both recipes are made by simply combining the ingredients and marinading the meat for 4 hours or, ideally, overnight.  After that all you have to do is thread the pieces of meat onto skewers and barbecue them.


The Challenge: History Detective.

The Recipe: See above.

The Date/Year and Region: Greece, 1600 - 1100 BCE.

How Did You Make It: See above.  If you're unfamiliar with saffron, remember to soak the threads in a spoonful of warm water for a few minutes before adding them to your marinade.

Time to Complete: A few minutes to prepare, plus grilling and marinating time.  I suggest making the marinade the day before and leaving it overnight, especially with recipe 2.

Total Cost: $9 for a packet of saffron; all the other ingredients are ones I normally have in my kitchen.  In the Bronze Age, however, the saffron and other spices would have been eye-wateringly expensive.

How Successful Was It? Both recipes were very nice.  Recipe 1 is my favourite, but they're both good.

How Accurate Is It? As I said previously, these recipes represent my best guess as to what Mycenaean cooking might have been like.  It's an educated guess based on what we know about how the Mycenaeans prepared food and the ingredients they used, as well as my own experience of what makes a good marinade, but it is a guess.



* We know this because of the many types of specialised cooking vessel mentioned in Linear B tablets.  For more information see Lis, B. 2008.  "Cooked food in the Mycenaean feast - evidence from the cooking pots", published in Dais or available online here.

What are o-pa-wo-ta?

That picture again.

The Phaistos helmet has circular markings with little holes in the middle at regular intervals around the outside.  These are reinforcement discs, or o-pa-wo-ta in Linear B (έπαϝορτα) .  It means "attachments", and we know from Linear B archives that o-pa-wo-ta were used on both helmets and body armour to enhance the protective qualities of perishable materials such as leather and linen.  O-pa-wo-ta were made of bronze (possibly ivory or bone in some cases), and they gave extra protection against arrows and sword blows.  Very few bronze age helmets were made entirely of metal, but metal reinforcement pieces were a common design element right through the bronze age.  The Phaistos relief would have had metal discs that unfortunately haven't survived, and they would have been shaped like little nails with pins driven into the holes in the ivory piece.

Reinforcement pieces on real helmets were either metal studs with pins that were hammered through the leather, or perforated discs stitched to the leather.  Archaeological evidence suggest both types were used, but for this project I'm going with metal studs similar to these late bronze age examples found at Lakkithra, which have a round, slightly domed head with a pin in the center.

Small bronze nails used to reinforce a helmet, found at Lakkithra.

Bronze age art indicates o-pa-wo-ta came in all sizes, from relatively large ones on the Phaistos relief to tiny ones that look more like studs on a leather jacket on the Warrior Vase from Mycenae, made around 1200 BCE.  The white dots on these helmets represent o-pa-wo-ta.  Bearing in mind the fact that o-pa-wo-ta could also be used on body armour, the white dots on the warriors' kilts may also represent o-pa-wo-ta.

Picture found here.

These small o-pa-wo-ta scattered randomly over the surface of the helmet are a bit unusual.  Most depictions of bronze age helmets show the o-pa-wo-ta arranged in horizontal rows.

I should point out here that the circular markings on the Phaistos relief don't necessarily indicate what shape the metal discs were.  It's quite possible they were round with a small circle in the middle, but they may not have been.  Other art works suggest plain round discs like the ones from Lakkithra and some clearly show o-pa-wo-ta shaped like rosettes, which is why I was quite excited when I found some studs in the shape of little rosettes.

Those are furniture tacks.  They were described as "bronze" on the Ebay listing, but of course that refers to the colour.  I doubt they are actually bronze, but they do look about right.  As you can see they're a lot like the Lakkithra studs, apart from the embossed rosettes.  They have the same slightly domed head and central pin.  Even though they aren't quite the right metal, I'm very pleased with them.

Studs in the shape of rosettes are shown on some pictures of helmets from this time, and rosettes in general were a common design in Minoan and Mycenaean art.  Many were very similar to the rosettes on my furniture tacks.

A Minoan helmet with rosette-shaped studs and what appear to be rows of boar tusks.

References for the Linear B tablets:

Chadwick, J., Killen, J. T., Olivier, J.P. 1971.  The Knossos Tablets (4th Edition).  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ventris, M., Chadwick, J.  1956.  Documents in Mycenaean Greek.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Minoan/Mycenaean helmet pattern

My proposed reconstruction of the Phaistos helmet has two layers of leather: an inner layer that creates the distinctive conical shape, and an outer layer of horizontal bands that will be sewn together.  I'm putting the pattern on the net here in case anyone wants to use it.

This pattern is for the internal layer of the helmet; I'll talk about the outer layer in a future post, but today we're going to concentrate on the helmet's internal construction.  While the exterior design of bronze age Aegean helmets varied considerably, the internal construction seems not to have changed very much.  My helmet is based on a  Minoan relief from the 16th century BCE, but this pattern would work equally well for many of the late Mycenaean designs or for the classic boar's tusk model.  Enjoy!

The neck and cheek guards are of course optional; many bronze age helmets didn't have them.

This pattern makes a helmet whose circumference is 600 mm (24").  It needs to be slightly too big for your head because it will have a felt cap (πιλος) inside it.  If you use this pattern you'll have to check that the dimensions work for your head, but to some extent it's a one-size-fits-most deal.  If it's a bit loose all you have to do is add another layer of felt inside it. Linear B inventories of armour from Knossos and Pylos include helmets, which makes me wonder if they were sometimes mass produced.

The pattern piece is sewn together at the center front with linen thread and the top has been cut into strips, which are tied together in a bundle to give it the conical beehive shape.  This process is more difficult than you might think.  Expect to spend a lot of time fiddling with the top knot to make it work.

If you use very thick leather you'll find, as I did, that it's impossible to tie all the strips together at the top.  I tied only some of my strips into the top knot, and left the others free on the inside of the helmet.  I don't think this affects the protective qualities of the helmet, especially since this is only the internal layer, but it's interesting because when Homer describes Odysseus' helmet he says the leather strips at the top are "interwoven".  I wonder if this is what he meant?

My helmet is made of 5 mm thick veg-tanned armour leather.  Here in NZ it can be bought from Lapco and as far as leather goes it is not too expensive.  Ideally you do want this kind of leather, but if you can't get it or can't afford it you may be able to use an old leather jacket. Part of the reason you need thick, stiff leather is that the top part of the helmet has to keep its shape on its own without any other support.  It is literally strips of leather tied together.

You may be wondering why the seam is at the front instead of the back, which is the more intuitively obvious place.  That's because this helmet has a neck guard at the back.  Putting the seam up the center back would screw up the neck guard, and the seam will be covered by another layer of leather, plus metal reinforcing discs, so it should be safe enough.

Some thoughts on the beehive helmet

I want to make a beehive helmet, like the one shown in this ivory relief from Phaistos.  It's basically the same thing as the famous boars' tusk helmet featured in the Iliad,  but with what appear to be metal studs instead of tusks.  Metal studs may have been a cheaper alternative and were a popular choice right up until the end of the Bronze Age.

Picture from the Salimbeti website

Various forms of beehive helmet are depicted in Greek art from the Neolithic through to the end of the Bronze Age, but they all have that distinctive conical shape and in most cases seem to have been made from leather or linen, although metal versions did exist (and in some cases they continued to be used in the Classical period).

I'm reluctant to compare the beehive helmet to a modern military helmet, because it was designed for a different purpose.  The beehive helmet didn't have to stop bullets, because in 1600 BCE bullets didn't exist yet.  It had to protect the wearer from arrows and sword blows, as well as maces and stones fired from slingshots.  Slingshots were not uncommon on ancient battlefields in Europe and the Near East because they were cheap, and they could be very effective too.

This meant the beehive helmet had to be resistant to cutting or piercing, and it also had to protect the wearer from blunt force trauma.  It would have been very important to use designs and materials that could absorb and dissipate the kinetic energy from an impact.  In this respect I think the beehive helmet would have worked rather like a motorcycle helmet.

Let's take a look at a motorcycle helmet:

Image found here.

The helmet has a hard outer shell which may be made from thermoplastic, kevlar, or carbon fiber.  Inside the shell, there is a thick layer of styrofoam, which dissipates the energy of an impact.  This is the part that prevents head injury.  Next comes a layer of soft foam to help the helmet sit comfortably on the rider's head.  These days some military helmets also have foam inside them to absorb impacts.

Homer gives us a little bit of information on how boars’ tusk helmets were made, and I think this information can be used as a starting point for reconstructing the Phaistos helmet.  In book 10 of the Iliad Homer describes the boar’s tusk helmet which Meriones gave to Odysseus:

"On the inside there was a strong lining on interwoven straps, onto which a felt cap had been sewn in. The outside was cleverly adorned all around with rows of white tusks from a shiny-toothed boar, the tusks running in alternate directions in each row."

This is a cross section of the helmet Homer described:

Picture from http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/helmets2.htm

In terms of function, this is quite similar to the motorcycle helmet.  The boars' tusks correspond to the hard outer shell of the motorcycle helmet, while the leather core would absorb impacts.  The felt lining made it more comfortable to wear.  Boars' tusk helmets, by the way, weren't exclusive to Greece.  They've been found as far afield as Serbia.

The ivory helmet from Phaistos dates to the 16th century BCE and is therefore roughly contemporaneous with many depictions of boars' tusk helmets, so it seems feasible that it would be constructed in more or less the same way.  I'm going to explore that hypothesis, and try to reconstruct the Phaistos helmet using leather.

Economics and the fall of Mycenae

Recently I read a very interesting article about the Great Depression and why it took so long for the US economy to recover, and it made me think about the collapse of Mycenaean civilization at the end of the Bronze Age.  I've often thought there must be an economic dimension to the Late Bronze Age collapse, and reading this article got me wondering how much of that might have been due to the way Mycenaean governments managed their economies.

Map of Mycenaean and other civilizations in the 14th century BCE, via Wikimedia Commons

No one knows exactly what destroyed the Mycenaean city-states, but it appears that drought and famine were contributing factors.  Probably there were a number of factors involved, but for now back to the Great Depression:

When I was in school I was told the Great Depression was largely caused by laissez-faire economics, but the article I linked to provides a different perspective.  The author says the initial stock market crash was the inevitable result of federal monetary policy, but things could have been back to normal in a couple of years.  That had been the case with previous recessions.  Instead the Depression lasted twelve years because of a series of government interventions that were intended to stimulate the economy, but actually did more harm than good.   One example is that the US government introduced high tariffs on foreign goods to make people buy American made and encourage American manufacturing.   But countries that could no longer sell their products in America returned the favour by not buying American goods, and American exporters went bankrupt.  Farmers in particular relied on access to overseas markets and the agricultural sector collapsed.

Mycenaean government policy did not cause the Late Bronze Age collapse; the disaster affected the entire Aegean and Anatolia.  Hittite civilisation was also wiped out, and though Egypt survived she was never the same again.  However, I suggest the extreme centralization of the Mycenaean economy and its dependence on state administration may be one reason why it was hit so hard, and didn't recover once the region started to stabilize again.

How the Mycenaean economy worked

Mycenaean city-states were, to put it mildly, statist.  They revolved around large, centralized bureaucracies that had absolute control over production and trade.  The Mycenaean city-state was primarily an economic entity.  Their wealth was built on trade, and the production of commodities for export defined their way of life.   This is why Mycenaean art and artifacts - and writing - stopped being produced once the city-states collapsed.  These were state controlled industries and without the state to support them the industries collapsed too.

The Mycenaeans had what is known as a redistribution economy.  Income, in the form of produce, livestock, and other resources, was collected by the administrative centers, which used the income to support a huge workforce of textile manufacturers,  metal workers, perfume makers, furniture makers, potters, and other craftspeople.  The numbers of people involved really were very large; the city of Pylos had nearly 400 bronze smiths and 550 textile workers, while Knossos had 900 textile workers.  Olive oil, wine, and probably timber were also exported.

Inlaid dagger from a 16th century BCE tomb at Mycenae.  Mycenaean craftsmanship is truly awe-inspiring. 

Early archaeologists tended to think of Mycenaean trade as being mainly exchanges of prestige items between Mycenaean rulers and the rulers of other states with whom they interacted, but the evidence available now shows very large scale production of commodities that weren't always prestige items, and appear to have been made specifically for export.  Pottery, for instance, was not a luxury item suitable for diplomatic exchanges, but was exported in large quantities.  It may indicate the export of products like wine or oil that were stored in the pottery vessels.

This was not a cash economy and workers were paid in food rations, which wasn't unusual in the ancient world.  Some of the workers were slaves, but not all of them.  Some workers appear to have been farmers who were self-sufficient to some degree.  Citizens were required to provide the government with both produce and labour.  We don't know whether working in state industries was seen as a good opportunity, but it was almost certainly not optional.

To what extent did workers rely on the state?

In some cases it's possible to make an educated guess about how much time people spent working for the state, because they had a quota system.  We know, for instance, that each textile worker listed in the Knossos archives was expected to produce one unit of pa-we-a type cloth, or one unit of te-pa type cloth, and we know how much wool was used to make each unit.  In a paper for the 9th International Aegean Conference, Eva Andersson and Marie-Louise Nosch calculated it would take a specialist worker 175 days to spin the wool required for a unit of pa-we-a type cloth.  If that calculation is accurate it represents a lot of work, and let's not forget the opportunity cost.  The time each woman spent making textiles for export was time she couldn't spend producing clothing and food for her own family, which she would also have had to do.

From an economic perspective the trouble with a quota system is that it isn't responsive to market demands, and creates perverse incentives.  Producers concentrate on filling their quotas, regardless of whether they're making things buyers want.  If you cannot find a market for those goods, this tends to create a problem.  It was certainly a problem for the Soviet economy* and may well have become a problem for the Mycenaeans too.

At the end of the Bronze Age widespread famine and social instability disrupted international commerce, and it is possible the market for Mycenaean manufactured products dried up.  As we've seen, the Knossos tablets suggest that textile workers, and maybe other workers too, were highly reliant on the state and its trading activities for their survival.  You can imagine what would have happened if large numbers of people found themselves out of work, or not getting paid for their work.  They couldn't find other jobs, because there were no other employers.   Keep in mind the fact that most of the Mycenaean palaces were not simply abandoned, they were violently destroyed.

The state as a monopoly

One of the ways a Mycenaean state controlled its means of production was by controlling access to markets and to raw materials.  In many cases the raw materials needed to manufacture Mycenaean commodities were acquired through trade, as payment for manufactured goods or primary products.  Trading was done by the governments, and as far as I know there's no evidence that private citizens worked as merchants.  Of course, it is important to recognise that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.  Lack of evidence does not prove there were no economic activities taking place outside the central administration's control, but given the lack of evidence for free enterprise you have to wonder whether governments were actively discouraging it with a view to maintaining their monopolies.  Because the state controlled access to resources, setting up large-scale free enterprise may have been quite difficult anyway.

All this meant that the economy was more than reliant on the government; it was functionally inseparable from the government.  Once the administrative center was destroyed, the infrastructure that Mycenaean industries relied on was no longer there.  By that I mean both physical infrastructure, and people with the skills and knowledge necessary to manufacture commodities and organize large-scale economic activity.  Anything that affected the city-state overall affected everybody and every industry the state was involved with, all at the same time.

Conclusions

The Mycenaean way of life was very different from ours.  Government, economy, industry, and even religion were all rolled into one with very little functional distinction between them.  The system may have originated as a logical way to support large-scale industry by creating economies of scale, and it seems to have worked fairly well when times were good.  The grave goods of elite Mycenaeans show how affluent they were.  However, this extremely centralized production model may have become a problem.  If the central bureaucracy ceased to function for any reason, the state's entire manufacturing  and export industry also ceased to function.  This may be why the Mycenaean city-states didn't recover from the famine and social instability that marked the end of the Bronze Age.

It's also possible that the way Mycenaeans industries were managed left them vulnerable to changes in the wider Aegean and Near Eastern markets.  Mycenaean industries weren't based on demand and profit, they were based on quotas set by the state, and such systems tend not to be very flexible.  Bureaucracies never cope well with change.

Of course, this is all just me speculating, but I think it's both important and interesting to consider ancient civilizations in terms of economic principles.


*However, I would be surprised if Mycenaean industries experienced the same quality control issues for which Soviet products were notorious.  Mycenaean industries seem to have been quite committed to maintaining quality, and since some of the things they were making were luxury goods this was probably necessary.

Sources

Andersson, A and Nosch, M.  2003.  "Investigating Mycenaean Textiles with Help from Scandinavian Experimental Archaeology", published in Metron.

Chadwick, J. 1976. The Mycenaean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chadwick, J. 1958. The Decipherment of Linear B. Second edition 1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Some of the information in Chadwick's books is a bit dated now, but they're still good books and well worth reading.

Cline, Eric H., ed. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kelder, J. M. 2010. "The Kingdom of Mycenae: A Great Kingdom in the Late Bronze Age Aegean".  Bethesda: CDL Press.

Van Wijngaarden, G. J.  2002. Use and Appreciation of Mycenaean Pottery in the Levant, Cyprus and Italy (ca. 1600-1200 BC).  Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

The "sacral knot"

The "sacral knot" is a loop of cloth with two fringed ends hanging down, and it occurs quite often in Minoan and Mycenaean art.  In some paintings, like this one from Knossos, people wear these knots attached to the back of their clothes.

Image found here.

It was Arthur Evans who coined the term "sacral knot".  I don't like the term and I think Evans tended to let his romantic sensibilities run away with him.  The knot certainly had cultural and possibly ritual significance, but we don't know exactly what it signified.  It may have been a kind of protective amulet, similar to the Egyptian tyet hieroglyph.

Anyway, the knotted scarf has a very long history in the Aegean.  When the knot occurs in paintings, it's coloured blue and red*.  It usually has a reticulated pattern with blue and red fringes, which confirms that there are two warp colours involved.

Faience "sacral knots" from Grave Circle A at Mycenae.  Picture found here.

Working out how to finish the ends was a bit of a problem for me.  The warp threads are allowed to hang loose on these knots, and don't appear to have been knotted together to prevent unraveling.  So how should I stop the ends unraveling?  And what about the coloured stripes at each end?  Those could be supplementary weft threads, but that doesn't explain how to finish the ends.  So I've taken a bit of an educated guess and twined red yarn around the warp threads.**  I should stress this is totally conjectural.  It stops the fabric unraveling and replicates the coloured stripe at the ends of the Mycenaean knot, but beyond that there's no support for this method.  This is another one for the "you can't prove it's wrong" file.

The Challenge: Re-do.  I'm repeating Challenge 10: Art, but also Challenge 13: Under $10 and Challenge 2: Innovation, which is cool because I didn't manage to do Innovation the first time round and that really bummed me out.  Using supplementary yarns to create patterned textiles was a very early innovation, but one of the most important innovations in the history of Bronze Age Aegean textile manufacture.

Fabric: Relatively balanced tabby weave woolen cloth with a supplementary warp pattern.

Pattern: I drafted it myself based on Minoan and Mycenaean art.

Year: Anywhere from 1700 to 1050 BCE.

Notions: N/A.

How historically accurate is it?  Well, I know the colours are about right, but this wool will have been dyed with synthetic dyes and while wool is probably the right fiber, Bronze Age wool was structurally different to the merino wool available in my local shop.

I have tried to construct the fabric in as accurate a way as possible, based on what we know about Bronze Age Aegean textile production, but as I said my method of binding the ends is conjectural.  All up, I'd guess maybe 8/10 for accuracy.

Hours to complete: Somewhere around 5 hours.

First worn: Yesterday to Classics Department movie night.

Total cost: $9.90.


*Crowley, J. L. 2012 ‘Prestige Clothing in the Bronze Age Aegean’  in Kosmos pp 231-239.
**The stripes on the ends of the Mycenaean bands are clearly stripes of contrasting colour.   You could do that with a weft faced weave, but many depictions of sacral knots predate the use of weft faced weaving in the Aegean (see Smith, J. 2012 ‘Tapestries in the Mediterranean Late Bronze Age’ in Kosmos, pp 241-248).  Weft faced cloth only shows up at the end of the Bronze Age, probably for the simple reason that it's very, very hard to achieve on a warp weighted loom.  It might be doable using linen warp, wool weft and very heavy weights, but tapestry looms would be a better choice.  In later periods weft-faced cloth was made on tapestry looms.  

Supplementary warp band

For HSF Challenge 10 I made a woven band based on a fresco from Tyrins, and it damn near killed me.  So naturally I'm doing another one for Challenge 21: Re-do.  But this time it will be different, because I've chosen a simpler design and a different construction method.  Last time I used supplementary weft.  This time it's supplementary warp and in only two colours.

What made my last attempt at Bronze Age band weaving so particularly hellish was that I had to juggle five colours of supplementary yarn.  Here, however, I only have one.  I learned that lesson.

When I made the Tyrins band a couple of people on the Historical Sew Fortnightly Facebook group asked if I took photos of the construction process, but unfortunately I didn't have this blog at the time and hadn't taken any pictures.  Well folks, prepare to laugh yourselves silly as I show you the dodgiest warp weighted loom set up you will ever see.

This loom has everything.  Cardboard tubes I fished out of the recycling bag, parts of a rigid heddle loom (the rigid heddle may or may not be period), teacups used as weights, a chair back, and of course lots of string.

The skein of red wool hanging over the chair back is the supplementary warp, which will create the design on the finished cloth.  In this next photo, the supplementary warp is woven into the fabric.  Supplementary warp is the most likely method for making the decorative bands that adorned Minoan and Mycenaean clothes, although based on my experience with the Tyrins band I'm pretty sure that design couldn't be done just with supplementary warp.  Because it has thin horizontal lines it would need supplementary wefts as well.  I'm not game to find out.

The blue and red look nicer together than I thought they would.

This band is based on examples from Knossos and Mycenae.  It's easy to make, and the pattern is even reversible.  I think of it as a fishing net pattern, though I have no idea if that's what it was supposed to represent.

Warp weighted looms are a fairly complicated concept, but as I've demonstrated they're extremely simple to make.  The Greek term is a histon, and the looms used in the Bronze Age were probably just like the ones pictured on later Greek vases.  My loom obviously uses modern materials, but it works in just the same way as an ancient loom and it makes the same type of cloth.

Hera's veil

HSF challenge 18 is Poetry in Motion, and when I think poetry I automatically think Homer.  In this case I'm thinking of the passage from book XIV of the Iliad where Hera is getting dressed up for the night so she can pull a fast one on Zeus.  She completes her ensemble with a newly made white veil that shines like the sun:

κρηδέμνῳ δ' ἐφύπερθε καλύψατο δῖα θεάων
καλῷ νηγατέῳ: λευκὸν δ' ἦν ἠέλιος ὥς
          -Iliad, book XIV

Nice and transparent, just like the Akrotiri picture.

To figure out what a Bronze Age Greek veil might look like, I used the veiled dancer fresco from Akrotiri.  The fact that the Iliad was written down in its current form almost a thousand years after the Akrotiri frescoes were painted isn't actually a problem, because the Iliad is set in the Bronze Age and contains plenty of Bronze Age elements.  For example, warriors in the Iliad have massive tower-like shields which were long since obsolete by the time the poem was written down, and these tower shields are shown in the Akrotiri frescoes.

The picture I based my veil on.  Image found here.

The Akrotiri veil is yellow, of course, while Hera's is white.  This isn't surprising - yellow wouldn't be appropriate for Hera.  Yellow was associated with unmarried women in ancient Greece, and Hera is (among other things) the goddess of marriage.  I did keep the blue borders at each end and the little carnelian beads, because a plain white rectangle is boring, but I had to guess at the size of the veil.  I settled on 200 centimeters by 90 centimeters based on the fresco.

The stripes at each end of the veil could either have been woven into the fabric, or stitched on.  I tend to think they represent a decorative band that was separate from the main fabric and stitched into place, which seems to have been a common way of decorating Minoan and Mycenaean clothes.  Allow me to refer you to my previous blog post, where I talk about weaving a sample of decorative band from Tyrins.

I didn't weave bands for Hera's veil.  I was already intending to sew some 300 carnelian beads onto it and was uneasily aware that I wouldn't enjoy the process.  Instead I stitched two stripes of blue silk taffeta to the ends of the veil.  You do often get plain bands in a contrasting colour, especially in Mycenaean art.

When I sewed the bands on I made a really interesting discovery: the blue silk is stiffer than the white gauze, and it holds out the ends of the veil when they hang down.  Without this stiff edging the fabric would just bunch up.  This is exactly what we see in the picture from Akrotiri, and is another reason why I think the picture shows separate cloth bands stitched to the ends of the veil.

HSF details...

The Challenge: Poetry in Motion

Fabric: Two meters of white silk gauze and scraps of the same blue silk taffeta I used on the Akrotiri dress.  See this previous post for a summary of evidence for silk use in the Bronze Age Aegean.

Pattern: None.  It's a rectangle.

Year: The Iliad isn't set in a specific year, but the Akrotiri fresco I based the veil on dates from 1650 to 1550 BCE.

Notions: Silk thread and lots of 3mm carnelian beads.

How historically accurate is it?  Well, it probably isn't too bad, although the silk comes from a different type of moth to the ones they had in the Aegean.  One thing that's almost certainly not accurate is the small rolled hems along each side.  The original would have been woven to the desired width, but the selvages of my silk were very clearly the product of a modern jet loom and at least little rolled hems are plausible for the period.

Hours to complete: Maybe 8 or so.  I lost count.

First worn: In front of the mirror to see how it draped.  I can neither confirm nor deny that I made a tit of myself posing like the Akrotiri girl during this process.

Total cost: I think about $32.  I can't remember how much the beads were, but I think they were somewhere around $12.