The Mycenaean Economy
Between about 1700 and 1050 BCE, Mycenaean communities developed across mainland Greece, Crete and the Aegean islands. The clearest written records come from the palatial period, especially about 1400 to 1200 BCE, when centers such as Pylos in southwestern Greece and Knossos on Crete kept administrative accounts. Scribes pressed Linear B, a syllabic script for Mycenaean Greek, into damp clay tablets to note land, goods, work groups and obligations. Modern catalogues identify surviving tablets with labels such as Ep 704, Aa 85 and Jn 829; Ma 123 belongs to the Ma series. Fires that destroyed palace buildings baked many tablets hard, preserving a record of selected transactions alongside evidence from houses, workshops, fields and ship cargoes.
Farming, herding and land
Grain, grapes, olives and livestock supplied food and products for processing and storage. Households grew and gathered crops, tended animals and prepared harvests: grain was threshed, cleaned, ground and stored; grapes could be made into wine; olives yielded oil; sheep supplied wool; and flax was grown for fibre. This linked farming to textile-making, food preparation and storage. Linear B records list grain alongside figs, olives and flax. At Glas, a fortified site in central Greece, excavators found storehouses containing at least two to three tonnes of einkorn, an early variety of wheat. The surrounding Copaïs basin was reclaimed from water behind dikes, creating fields close to the fortress. This link between drainage, cultivation and storage shows how landscape works could support a large harvest.
Palace tablets also describe who held land and what work or contributions came with it. At Pylos, a local collective called the dāmos participated in managing land shares. A plot could be measured by the seed grain needed to sow it, a measure of planting capacity rather than a map of its boundaries. On tablet Ep 704, the priestess Eritha described her holding as land for a god, while the dāmos classified it as a holding allotted from communal land. The distinction mattered because it shaped whether the holding owed a contribution from its produce. In the same record, a key-bearer named Karpathia held two communal shares and was expected to perform service for them. A separate Pylos land series records leases between individuals as well as plots leased from a local collective, showing that arrangements for land also operated between community members.
Crafts and organized labour
Specialists turned raw materials into usable products. Wool had to be spun and woven; flax fibre became linen; potters formed and fired vessels; smiths cast or shaped metal and repaired tools. Palace archives include lists of workers and allocations that linked some production to palatial stores. A Pylos workforce list, Aa 85, counts twelve women, sixteen girls and eight boys in a textile-related group, with supervisory roles also recorded. Food allowances in related records supplied dependent workers, connecting organized labor with provisions.
Other tablets record obligations at the level of districts. The Ma series is a modern label for Pylos clay accounts that assess contributions from localities. One account, Ma 123, set a target of twenty-four cloth units: twenty-one were recorded as delivered, two remained owing and one was exempt because the local smiths were not contributing it. The account reconciled the expected amount with what had been paid and excused. A different tablet, Jn 829, set out a planned collection of recycled bronze or copper from district officials for spear and javelin points. It describes anticipated contributions, not completed deliveries. Together, the records show how officials assigned and reconciled specific goods while craft production also took place in household and local settings.
Trade and wider networks
Containers, finished pottery and imported materials connected Mycenaean centers with regional and maritime exchange. Transport stirrup jars, with paired handles and a narrow false neck above a separate pouring spout, carried liquids such as oil or wine. Some were painted with Linear B words before firing. Jars marked with the adjective wanaktero, meaning “royal,” are interpreted as carrying produce from royal vineyards or olive groves. Examples made in western Crete appear at mainland sites, linking Cretan production and administration with destinations across the sea.
The Cape Gelidonya wreck, off the southern coast of present-day Turkey, offers a cargo view around 1200 BCE. It carried stacked copper ingots, scrap and used bronze tools, along with weights. A merchant could weigh metal for exchange or for combining copper with tin; broken tools remained useful as material for remelting. The cargo brings together raw metal and recyclable objects in a wider eastern Mediterranean network that also supplied Aegean workshops.
Around 1200 BCE, the destruction of palatial centers ended this archive-based accounting system. Communities continued farming and exchanging goods in the post-palatial period, while settlement remains and pottery trace production and movement under changed conditions.
For the wider setting, see Mycenaean History and Society.