Labyrinth
On the Knossos Tablets. The Find-Places of the Knossos Tablets. By L. R. Palmer. The Date of the Knossos Tablets. By John Boardman. (O.U.P., 84s.) THESE salvoes are the heaviest yet fired in the seemingly interminable Knossos war. Professor Palmer uses a louder explosive, but Mr. Board- man's gunnery is the more accurate. The Pro- fessor continues to maintain that all the Linear B tablets from the Palace of Minos were inscribed about 1200 sc, or even later, whereas his opponent upholds Sir Arthur Evans's dating of the tablets to about 1400 sc. I must at the outset declare my interest: I believe Professor Palmer to be in error, and said so in print more than two years ago—not out of friendship for Mr. Boardman, but after contemplating the strati- graphical facts then available and the historical implications of Professor Palmer's theories. Pro- fessor Palmer now at last gives extensive quo- tations from the excavation notebooks of Evans and his assistant Duncan Mackenzie in support of his claim that the excavators misunderstood the stratigraphy of Knossos, and a reviewer has already suggested that the Professor has won on points. However, the new quotations from the notebooks do not, I think, make his case look less weak than it was before. In short, Mr. Boardman in his quiet way wins on facts.
The crucial evidence for dating consists chiefly, but not only, in the records of tablets found below floors in sealed deposits. Mackenzie's notes on the Room of the Stirrup Jars and on the Room of the Saffron ('Flower') Gatherer show that an earth floor separated tablets from pottery of the last phase of Minoan occupa- tion at Knossos, and it is clear that the tablets were deposited or dumped below the floors earlier than the pots were placed above the floors. So the tablets here cannot possibly all belong to the latest phase of occupation in Knossos. When, then, were the tablets deposited? Since recent examination of pottery in the Strati- graphical Museum at Knossos confirms that there was burning in the palace when the pottery
• type known as Late Minoan 111A was in use, it is reasonable to suppose that the tablets, too, were burned, and so preserved, during the penul- timate phase of occupation at Knossos (Late Minoan HIA, 1400 BC or a little later). Professor Palmer reveals an almost scholastic ingenuity in detecting inconsistencies between statements in the notebooks of the excavators, their early printed reports, and Evans's reflec- tions in the Palace of Minos. He also displays remarkable versatility in the marshalling of quo- iations to support his theses—experto credite, I have already been quoted out of context on the subject of Late Minoan stirrup jars. He is ever ready to assume that Late Minoan IIIB vases date the burned and broken tablets found in association with them, when in every instance the late vases show only when the tablets were dumped or scattered, not when they were in- scribed or when they were preserved by burn- ing. Sometimes he is too eager to assume that reports of 'Late Minoan III' pottery refer to vases of about 1200 BC (Late' Minoan IIIB) rather than vases of about 200 years earlier (Late Minoan IIIA).
Professor Palmer does not seem to have thought out the problems his proposed dating of the Linear B texts to 1200 BC or later at Knossos raises. We are asked to believe that in the period of the dismal failure of Mycenman society, when the Hittite empire also collapsed, and the islands and coasts of the eastern Mediter- ranean were being plundered repeatedly by migrants and marauders, Crete was enjoying a period of great prosperity, and the lord of Knossos was administering the whole of his island by means of an efficient bureaucracy, Knossos having still suffered no damage, though the rest of the Aegean world was in turmoil. According to Homer, Idomeneus, King of Knossos at the time of the Trojan War, ruled central Crete only: Professor Palmer's thesis would require us to believe that in the age of MYcenxan decline and collapse a King of Knossos had succeeded in extending his adminis- tration over the whole of the island when the rest of Aegean palace society was fighting for its life. The request is paradoxical. A hardly less para- doxical consequence of the Professor's views is that the rulers of the great palace destroyed about 1400 uc left no written records at all, but he has never clearly explained what he believes happened about 1400 BC or when, in his opinion, speakers of Greek arrived in Knossos.
In fact, the Professor's very late dating of the tablets comes not from purely archeological arguments, but from philology also. He be- lieves that certain forms of words in use at Knossos are more advanced than those at Pylos, but linguistic argument such as this can prove nothing about the date of the texts, especially since there are certain words in the Pylian texts which may well be linguistically more advanced than their Knossian forms.
Professor Palmer is a doughty fighter, as well as an assiduous grinder of double-axes. We may be sure that the last has not been heard of his views on Knossos. Meanwhile, what of the archeological future of the site? Linear B texts were being written about 1400 BC: did the use of the script cease at Knossos after the destruc- tion of the palace? There are, in fact, hints from the so-called Little Palace that the script was still known in the fourteenth or thirteenth cen- tury tic and more excavation is much needed nearby in the Unexplored Mansion and its vicinity to see whether undisturbed tablets can be found in Late Minoan IIIB contexts. How- ever, a meticulous excavation there would be very expensive, and it seems unlikely that the British School would at present be able to under- take the work. Yet there lie the solutions to many problems about Late Minoan IIIB Knossos. Somewhere, too, in the neighbourhood the resi- dence of King Idomeneus has yet to be found.
Everyone interested in Aegean prehistory will be grateful to Professor Palmer for the long excerpts he gives from the excavators' notebooks and to Mr. Boardman for his assessment of them as evidence. The publication of the excerpts and the concordances of tablets is a service to scholarship, and will be remembered when all the disputes have died. Much of the fuss over Knossos would have been avoided if Professor Palmer had not published his theories so long before presenting adequately the evidence on which he based them. As it is, we may be thank- ful that the competence of Evans and Mackenzie is so soundly vindicated by their own testimony.
GEORGE HUXLEY
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