37 bath attendants
13 girls
15 boys
c. 10661 of wheat
c. 10661 of figs
Children, half rations
Linear B Tablet, Ab553: Rations of Wheat and Figs for Women and Children. c. 1200 BC
CHILDREN ARE DIFFICULT TO TRACE in the distant past – they leave little clutter behind them. In most cases, their bodies have been scavenged centuries before any archaeologist can get to them and their bones are often too fragile to survive in the archaeological record. Sometimes, however, an unexpected ghost of their presence appears. Linear B tablets from Knossos show the delicate palm-prints of small children who had been patting out the clay tablets in preparation for use by adult scribes. In one grave in Chania, Crete, a humble, nineteen-year-old woman has been buried with a late-term embryo, presumably hers. Here, mixed in among the finger-bones of the woman, is a single leg-bone of the baby. Someone clearly thought it important that the two – mother and child – travel to the afterlife together.1
It is the Mycenaean homes for the dead that tell us most about Mycenaean lives. But, frustratingly, child burials are scant in number, and thanks to the common pre-historic practice of communal burials and the timeless practice of grave-robbing, it is impossible to trace infant burial patterns with any real confidence. Some burials are plain and simple whereas others burst with gifts. A few are in tombs, others in pits (small holes in soft rock) and cists (oblong graves usually lined with stones) or even under floors, behind walls or in staircases.2
One aristocratic girl who died in Mycenae in the 17th century BC, aged about five or six, was buried, hemmed in with vases.3 Her body was draped with jewellery – a necklace of rock crystal with a blue pendant, a ring of coiled gold wire on the little finger of her left hand and a diadem decorated with gold rosettes on her head. Semi-precious stones – carnelian, amethyst and rock crystal – were looped across her temples.4 Undecorated gold foil was pressed around the tiny corpses of two other children buried in Shaft Grave III, Circle A. The bodies themselves are long gone – and a finer foil drifts over the place where each infant’s face would once have been.
Some dead children appear to have been left with toys5 – perhaps thought to harbour friendly spirits.6 Mycenaean ‘feeding bottles’ have also been excavated from a number of children’s graves. These are well-designed receptacles – perfect for the weaning toddler. A number contain residues of honey and dairy products but recent analysis of organic deposits caught and preserved in the rough clay interior suggests that these spouted jugs were used to carry a whole range of substances – including drugged wine. One pretty, striped example from Midea7 contained a concoction of wine, barley beer and mead. A potent mix. The use of a feeding bottle to administer alcohol does not preclude its being given to infants. A dead baby has usually been a sick one. It is more than likely that drugs and alcohol were used to dull the child’s senses as it struggled with a fatal illness or infection.
This being a world before advanced medicine, many children, particularly the poor, would have succumbed to disease. The results of bone tests from the cemetery at Armenoi in Mycenaean Crete tell a sorry tale.8 All the individuals studied lived between 1390 and 1190 BC. The infectious diseases osteomyelitis (infection of the bone marrow), brucellosis (which produces flu-like symptoms or even degradation of the central-nervous system when the Brucella bacterium is ingested in milk) and tuberculosis were present. There were nutritional hazards, osteoporosis, scurvy, rickets, iron-deficiency and anaemia, as well as cancer. Forty per cent of the children in the sample from this particular cemetery died before they were two, 50 per cent before they were five.9
Although a child’s life was in constant jeopardy even in aristocratic circles, it does not seem to have been cheap. There is one artefact from Mycenae which hints not at insouciance, but tenderness – perhaps even at mother love within palace-culture. It is a small ivory group – originally rainbow-coloured and inlaid – found on the Mycenaean citadel in 1939. 10 Carved in the round, two women – who share a woollen shawl between them – hug a young child, proudly and protectively, in their laps. The girl or boy (the jury is still out, although the figure does wear clothes usually worn by young girls) sports a full-length dress, tied in at the waist, and has earrings and a necklace similar to that of the older women. She or he is draped across the knees of one woman and leans on the thigh of another; doing that childish thing of taking up as much adult attention as is physically possible. One of the women has her arm curved across the child’s back. Her hands are slender but this is a strong embrace.
Whether the tableau personifies divine or mortal characters, it is clearly a representation of the human form and an acute observation of the bond between adult and child.11 Now the trio rests in the cool confines of the refurbished National Archaeological Museum in Athens. But even there, protected from human touch by glass and security alarms, the group radiates intimacy.
When I first saw the carving12 I was researching dress-styles in the Mycenaean period but words of Helen’s, from the Iliad, immediately came to mind. In Troy, Helen confides in King Priam, confessing the things she misses from home:
And Helen the radiance of women answered Priam, ‘I revere you so, dear father, dread you too – if only death had pleased me then, grim death, that day I followed your son to Troy, forsaking my marriage bed, my kinsmen and my child, my favourite, now full grown, and the lovely comradeship of women my own age.’ 13
The comradeship of women – not, I think, simply poetic imagination. Mycenaean signet rings and wall-paintings imply that women conducted religious rituals in same-sex groups.14 Frescoes from the palaces show finely dressed women processing along side by side. Linear B tablets tell us that working women spent their days together with their children in labour-gangs.15 We are even given the names of some of those who laboured side by side: Wordieia (‘Rosie’ or ‘garden of roses’),16 Theodora, Alexandra and Mano.17In tribal Mycenaean culture women, both the rich and the poor, spent a great deal of time in one another’s company. It is no surprise that Homer’s Helen admits to missing not just her kith and kin, but her female attendants and her companions in the decorated halls.
In the Argos Museum, almost lost among a medley of artefacts in a glass case, there is another sculpture of a woman from the Late Bronze Age – a simple, terracotta figurine. She is what archaeologists call a Phi-type terra-cotta. These rudimentary human figures, usually 10–20 cm tall, and often a lone woman with raised arms, could have represented a number of things: the caring powers of women, female fecundity, a votary or a goddess, no one yet knows. But what is certain is that they would have formed part of the day-to-day experience of a Bronze Age noblewoman such as Helen. The figurines are always women with breasts high and far apart – each mammary the shape and size of a squashed pea. They are called Phi-figurines because they resemble the Greek letter Φ: there are also Psi (Ψ) and Tau (T) types.18
The little woman in Argos is in fact a Phi-kourotrophos – a nursing mother. Someone has rolled a wormy shape out of the mud and given the woman a baby, wrapped in a shawl, to cradle. So far, around seventy of these kourotrophos figures from the Mycenaean world have been discovered. Most nurse single babies – usually cradled to the left breast (as you would expect, to keep the child’s head close to a beating heart and leave the carer’s right hand free). In a handful of versions there are two babies. An example from Tomb 41 at Mycenae shows the woman figure nursing one baby carefully on her chest with a parasol balanced over a second precious bundle on her back.19
Archaeologists usually find such figurines in graves, but during the life of their owner they could well have sat on the floor or a shelf, whether in a Mycenaean palace or a shack: gifts of thanks for a newborn child, good-luck charms to keep the gods on side throughout the difficult business of conceiving and then bringing up a young family – the original talis(wo)men. A full 9,000 fragments of the Phi, Psi and Tau female figurines have been found at Mycenae alone, where around 200 new fragments a year are discovered.20 In the settlements of the 13th century BC they would have been virtually omnipresent. And the figurines or figures of men?21 They are simply not there. The kourotrophoi terracottas raise one question about the bond between woman and infant in the Late Bronze Age, and as a collective presence the female figurines posit an even greater one about the spiritual landscape of the Late Bronze Age – and the role of women within it.