Mycenaean Farming and Landholding

Farming across Late Bronze Age mainland Greece, Crete and nearby islands supplied households with grain, fruit, livestock and textile fibres. From about 1400 to 1200 BCE, palatial centers such as Pylos in Messenia recorded selected landholdings, seed quantities, products and services on clay tablets written in Linear B, the script used for Mycenaean Greek. Archaeobotanical remains at Tiryns in the Argolid show plants and animals handled locally, while Linear B records show how administrators measured particular obligations and supplies.

On this page4 sections

Crops, livestock and field work

Tiryns stood near the coast in the Argolid, in the northeastern Peloponnese. An archaeobotanical study by Melissa Vetters and colleagues examines plant remains, wood charcoal and phytoliths, microscopic silica bodies formed in plants, from Late Bronze Age rooms in its Lower Citadel. Earlier site-wide plant studies identify barley as the main cereal, followed by einkorn and emmer wheat. Bitter vetch, lentils, chickpeas and peas appear among the legumes. Figs and grapes are well attested, while olive stones and abundant olive charcoal in palatial-period deposits mark a rise in olive cultivation at the site. The cereals were apparently stored with their husks still on, which helped protect the grains.

The tablets and field evidence suggest a working cycle rather than a single palace-run farm. The AROURA project notes that Linear B records list teams of plough oxen and drivers, especially on land associated with the local dāmos, or community. Seed-grain measures indicate how much seed a plot required; archaeologists interpret the recorded amounts as consistent with broadcasting seed across open fields tilled and manured with animal power. Paul Halstead compares these records with traditional Mediterranean farming to explain how a palace might lend ox teams while local communities supplied land and perhaps harvest and winnowing labor. Harvest time concentrated work: grain had to be gathered, threshed to release kernels from stalks, winnowed to blow away chaff, and stored. At the fortified storehouses of Glas, excavators found grain that had already been threshed and cleaned elsewhere.

The Tiryns study also connects plant traces with animal management. In one Lower Citadel room, grass phytoliths in dung, together with relatively few traces of browse, meaning leafy vegetation eaten by grazing animals, led the authors to infer that sheep probably predominated over goats. Straw and cereal traces in the dung point to supplementary fodder alongside grazing.

Knossos, on Crete, offers another view of field work. After earlier Minoan palace phases, the site became a center of Greek-language palatial administration, with records written in Linear B. In classics scholar Thomas G. Palaima’s reading of these records, pairs of worker oxen were assigned to several sites, while a harvest tablet records grain, olives and cyperus sedge from Da-wo in the Mesara plain of south-central Crete. The ox entries show that recordkeepers tracked animals able to provide traction and hauling; the harvest record registers gathered produce from a named region.

From farm products to palatial demand

Farming also supplied raw materials for skilled production. Sheep provided wool, while flax was cultivated for linen fibre. Thomas G. Palaima’s study of agricultural and building work in the Linear B tablets describes palatial records of textile materials, specialist workers, food allotments and shipments of finished cloth. These records connect rural production with a palatially administered workshop system. Max MacDonald’s 2017 University of Victoria thesis on the Pylos linen industry places flax cultivation and groups of linen workers across the palace’s two provinces, while records assign food provisions to some specialists. See the discussion of palatial administration for the offices and records that organized such work.

A clay tablet from Pylos, Un 718, records anticipated contributions for a ceremony honoring Poseidon, a Greek deity, in the district of sa-ra-pe-da. It names a ruler, called a wanax, a military leader called a lawagetas, the local landholding collective called the dāmos, and a fourth group associated with land cultivation or cult, called the worgioneion ka-ma. Each contributor was assigned grain and wine, alongside specified offerings such as cheese, honey, oil, sheepskin and sacrificial animals. The wanax was assigned 86.4 liters of wine, the dāmos 57.6, the lawagetas 19.2 and the worgioneion ka-ma group 9.6 liters. That scale shows how one ceremonial obligation drew on crops and vines as well as dairy and animal raising.

How Pylos recorded land

Pylos, on the southwestern coast of the Peloponnese, produced clay tablets that record particular landholders and the terms attached to their plots. In the land series, a plot’s size could be expressed by the amount of seed grain required to sow it. This was a measure of its planting capacity, rather than a boundary survey. The records use several categories for land and holders; Thomas Palaima describes o-na-to as land held for beneficial use and the dāmos as a local collective involved in distributing and managing communal land.

Tablet Ep 704 sets out a concrete disagreement over those terms. Eritha, a priestess, claimed a special category of land for a deity. The dāmos described her holding instead as a beneficial plot drawn from communal shares. Palaima interprets the dispute as concerning whether the holding or the deity represented by Eritha owed a contribution from its production. The same tablet says that Karpathia, a religious official called a key-bearer, held two communal shares and was expected to perform service for them, but had not done so. In these entries, administrators recorded who used land and the produce or work attached to that use.

Drainage and agricultural land

In central Greece, the Copaïs basin in Boeotia was a shallow lake that expanded seasonally. The northernmost Melas–Kephissos canal, the only canal AROURA identifies as Mycenaean, carried water toward sinkholes at the basin’s northeastern edge. Dykes helped direct and contain the flow, allowing waterlogged ground to be drained and reclaimed as fields. The fortified site of Glas stood on a low limestone island within the basin. MYNEKO excavation reports date its major fortress and associated hydraulic works to the Late Helladic IIIB period, around 1300–1190 BCE; some field-system features may be earlier. The basin’s drainage therefore developed in stages rather than through one combined canal system.

The palace records at Pylos end with the destruction of its administrative center around 1200 BCE. At Tiryns, excavations document settlement and plant use continuing through the twelfth century, after the palatial period. For the wider economic setting, see The Mycenaean Economy.