Long before Homer, the earliest form of ancient Greek was written on small clay tablets in a script called “Linear B.” The deciphered texts were discovered to be administrative records, not literature or poetry. Join archaeologists Dimitri Nakassis and Hana Sugioka as they reveal how even seemingly mundane lists offer fascinating glimpses into daily life in Bronze Age communities and palaces. Starting with a tablet naming people and ingredients associated with perfume production at the palace of Pylos, they uncover vivid aspects of Mycenean culture hidden in everyday documents.
Art Break: What People Wrote in the Late Bronze Age
Tablet on Perfume Making (detail), about 1180 BCE, Mycenaean. Clay. © Hellenic Ministry of Culture – HOCRED / National Archaeological Museum, Athens, P23469 / Photo: The Pylos Tablets Digital Project, © Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
About
Speakers
Dimitri Nakassis
Professor of Classics
Dimitri Nakassis is a professor of Classics at Colorado University Boulder and a MacArthur Foundation fellow. His research primarily focuses on the material and textual production of early Greek communities, especially of the Mycenaean societies of Late Bronze Age Greece. His book, Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (Brill 2013), studied the individuals named in the administrative Linear B texts and argued for a less hierarchical and much more dynamic reconstruction of Mycenaean society.
Hana Sugioka
Getty Graduate Intern
Hana Sugioka is the 2024-25 graduate curatorial intern in the Antiquities Department at the Getty Villa. She received her MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and will start her PhD in Classical Archaeology at UC Berkeley this fall. Her recent research project examined the presence of signet rings and sealstones in Bronze Age tombs in mainland Greece and Crete.
Related Exhibitions
Need help?
Contact us! 9 am–5 pm, 7 days a week
(310) 440-7300