How elitist were typical Mycenaean communities? Investigating relative status in Mycenaean damoi through the landholders of the Pylos Ep and Ea series

Although traditionally the focus of Mycenaean studies has been the elite and the administrative centres referred to as ‘palaces’, nonetheless academics investigating Mycenaean society have increasingly turned their attention to nonpalatial sectors of society. This article investigates the different levels of society that are recorded within two Linear B land tenure series, specifically the Ep and Ea series. The Ep tablets record the landholdings of the inhabitants of pa-ki-ja-ne, a damos that was home to Pylos's most significant sanctuary. A steep hierarchy is demonstrated for its inhabitants by the relative sizes of their landholdings, with prominent religious personnel among those at the top and many ‘servants of the deity’ at the bottom. The Ea damos, in contrast, differs in the professional titles of the landholders—craftsmen and animal herders are prevalent—and in the relative sizes of the landholdings: the Ea series records plots of land that were more equitably sized and generally larger than those of pa-ki-ja-ne. The Ea series can likely be considered as more representative of Mycenaean damoi than pa-ki-ja-ne, which could indicate that the social structure of typical Mycenaean communities was not steeply hierarchical, and perhaps more egalitarian than may have been thought.