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Title: Mycenaeans and Minoans by Leonard Robert Palmer ISBN: 0-313-22160-X Publisher: Greenwood Publishing Group Pub. Date: 15 February, 1980 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $37.50

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: A POOR THING BUT MINOAN
Comment: Joking aside, this is an absolutely wonderful book. How many people it will appeal to I have no idea. On the one hand it is not going to rival Tolkien or J K Rowling for sales. On the other hand as scholarly revolutions, and scholarly controversies, go it is one of the famous ones, and one that in its time made banner newspaper headlines.

This is the second edition of a book that had to be extensively rewritten because the evidence was pouring in even as the author wrote the work. Palmer had been very quick to support the decipherment, by a young amateur Michael Ventris, of the Linear B tablets found both on the Greek mainland and at the Palace of Minos at Cnossos on Crete, famously excavated by Sir Arthur Evans, as being in the Greek language. This had a radical impact on the history (or prehistory) of the Bronze Age in Greece, because if these tablets are Greek it is patently impossible to suppose that the Greek invasion of Crete took place at some later date. As recast, the book now takes us through the decipherment process, the identification and location of the Mycenaean fortress of Pylos on the south-west Peloponnese, the early history of Crete and finally the origin of the Greeks themselves and a theory of the nature of the Linear A tablets, which Palmer believes to be in the Anatolian Indo-European language Luvian. This was, at least, the position in 1965. I have been out of touch with the issue since then, but whatever refinements have been made in subsequent scholarship, this book surely represents a watershed second only to the work of Ventris himself.

It is a book for scholars (some of whom clearly need it badly) but also for a certain type of lay reader. Palmer concedes that the book is to some extent demanding, but I would ascribe that more to the amount of detail than to anything else, and the detail is largely a matter of a plethora of place-names which can be followed from the maps. There is also a great deal of detail regarding the interpretation of the archaeological evidence. This should in fact be intelligible and enjoyable to anyone who enjoys following a good advocate's reasoning - Palmer himself uses the analogy of his readers as a jury at several points. Greek words and names are given in Roman script, and in general Palmer's vast learning is carried lightly and presented with skill and tact. As I remember him from real life, his mind is a little bit quick for mine and I sometimes had to scramble to keep abreast of the steps of his reasoning, but in general he is clear enough. He is careful not to burden the reader with excessive philological detail in particular, but I suspect a footnote about 'labio-velars' would actually have helped readers puzzled about how i-qo becomes 'hippos' the Greek for a horse, and it would not have hurt to let out that the syllable shared by the words for 'and' and 'four' is 'te'.

What made the book famous of course, is that in some places it flatly contradicts Evans based on the evidence of Evans himself and his collaborator Mackenzie. This is what produced the newspaper features claiming that Palmer had debunked Evans. In fact one should expect that, although Palmer, as if butter would not melt in his mouth, claims innocently that in fact Evans made two compensating errors and thus arrived not far off the truth. What it also produced was some scholarship of the worst kind in some quarters. Challenges to Ventris's decipherment had already been mounted, which is perfectly fair to that extent but which should not have descended to attacks on his integrity without very good evidence indeed. Palmer himself came under some knee-jerk straight-into-denial attack from a colleague at Oxford, the posthumous apostle of Evans. I never saw a better in-fighter than Palmer. He is afraid of nobody and nobody upsets him. The calm serious academic manner never deserts him and he is all the more effective for it.

I wonder where it has all gone since 1965, but I'll be surprised if this book is not still the major monument along the road. In this highly favourable assessment you will of course bear in mind that my teacher was, well, Palmer.