Dependent Workers and Slavery in the Mycenaean World

Across the Mycenaean world of the Late Bronze Age (about 1700–1050 BCE), palaces at Pylos on the Greek mainland and Knossos on Crete kept accounts of people, land and goods. The examples here come mainly from palace records of about 1450–1200 BCE, written on clay in Linear B, a syllabic script used to write an early form of Greek. The examples document different relationships and obligations: a named purchase at Knossos, land and service in Pylos accounts, and textile workers listed in a separate Pylos roster.

The tablets spell the male term do-e-ro and female do-e-ra, conventionally translated “slave” or “servant.” These labels occur in the Knossos purchase and Pylos land accounts; Aa 85’s textile roster uses a different occupational vocabulary to list its workforce.

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A purchased dependent at Knossos

At Knossos, tablet B 822 is read as recording the purchase of one male do-e-ro. Scholar Kalliopi Efkleidou identifies three people named in the entry: the man sold, the buyer and another participant. The verb is interpreted as “bought,” so this record describes a person transferred through a transaction between individuals.

The tablet belongs to Knossos’s later Greek-language Linear B archive, after the site’s earlier Minoan phase, the Bronze Age civilization of Crete. At Pylos, the same labels appear in land and religious accounts, placing them in a different institutional setting.

People attached to a deity and land at Pylos

At Pylos, in Messenia in the southwest Peloponnese, some people are recorded as a deity’s do-e-ro or do-e-ra. Pylos tablet Eo 269, for example, lists a named man as a servant of a god and records an o-na-to plot associated with him. In this land-accounting vocabulary, o-na-to describes land held for beneficial use. The tablet measures the plot through the quantity of seed grain assigned to it, a practical way for the palace to record the land’s agricultural capacity.

Other entries in the E series name people with religious titles, including a priestess and a key-bearer, a religious official. The E-series land accounts use terms involving the da-mo, the local collective land organization. Thomas Palaima, a scholar of Mycenaean records, notes that the interpretation remains debated: the phrase may indicate literal servitude, a ceremonial role or an honorific, a title of religious standing rather than a statement of ownership. The entries identify both the religious connection and the land associated with it.

Women and children in a textile work group

A different Pylos account, Aa 85, lists twelve women, sixteen girls and eight boys with two supervisors. The National Archaeological Museum of Athens identifies the tablet as a thirteenth-century BCE record from the Palace of Ano Englianos and describes the women as textile workers. Its note explains that their Linear B occupational term probably refers to final processing or decoration of cloth.

Aa 85 lists the group’s personnel. Related palace accounts show how food helped support organized labour: they record rations, allotted food allowances for workers, with larger amounts for supervisors. Aa 85 also places children with the women’s group, but does not identify their relationship or specify their tasks.

For more on the work itself, see textile production.

Land and service in a disputed account

Pylos tablet Ep 704 connects landholding with an obligation to work. It records Karpathia, a key-bearer, with two shares of communal land and says she was expected to perform service for those shares but had not done so. The tablet thus records an obligation that the palace still counted as outstanding.

The same tablet records a disagreement over the priestess Eritha’s plot. Eritha claimed etonijo, a special land category for a god; the da-mo classified it as a beneficial plot drawn from communal shares. The distinction mattered because the land’s classification affected the contribution expected from its produce. In this account, land access and a recorded service obligation formed two sides of the same arrangement.

For the wider setting, see Daily Life in the Mycenaean World.