The text below is meant to be read aloud at the start of the discussion section. It compresses the week's lecture into a few minutes and hands the room directly to the three tasks. The fuller notes that follow are for setting each task up in turn.
This week's lecture made a single, deliberately awkward argument: that the Minoans, the first palace civilization of the Aegean, reach us already interpreted — named by Arthur Evans after a Greek myth, their ruins rebuilt in concrete, their most famous paintings filled in by modern restorers, their language still unread. Our job was to get behind the romance to the structures underneath, and those structures turned out to be about trade and power.
We began before the palaces, with obsidian — volcanic glass carried across open water to the Greek mainland from the eleventh millennium BCE, proof that the sea was a working network of routes thousands of years before farming, let alone kings. Onto those ancient routes came bronze, and with bronze a problem: tin occurs nowhere in the Aegean, so every bronze blade depended on metal hauled from the far edges of the world — Afghanistan, or Cornwall, the debate is still live. That trade was never neutral or gentle. It existed to serve elites, it ran through palace storerooms and merchant cities like Ugarit, and — as the readable Mycenaean tablets show once Greeks take over Crete — it rested on the labour of dependent and unfree people, including gangs of women weavers who were very probably captives. So the comfortable phrase "peace-loving traders" does real damage: the Cretan palaces had weapons, fortifications, and combat injuries, and their wealth was extracted, not freely given.
The three tasks take this apart through objects and texts. The first puts a single shipwreck under the microscope; the second visits the greatest trading city of the age; the third steps inside a single mainland palace — the Palace of Nestor at Pylos — to read one accidental year of its accounts and ask what a redistributive kingdom actually was. Hold on to one question throughout: what can a physical object or a clay ledger tell us that nothing else can — and what does each conceal?
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Setting up the three tasks
Each task pairs an object or primary source with a scholarly argument, and each was signalled in the lecture. The notes here draw the link between the framing and the work the groups will do.
Task AThe world in one cargo — the Uluburun shipwreck
The lecture used the Uluburun wreck (c. 1300 BCE) as the single most vivid proof of Bronze Age interconnection: ten tonnes of Cypriot copper and a tonne of tin in close to the exact recipe for bronze, alongside Baltic amber, African ebony, glass, Canaanite resin, Mycenaean pottery, and a gold scarab of Nefertiti — three continents in one hull. The task pairs that cargo with a contemporary merchant's letter from Ugarit, written as catastrophe closed in. The point for the groups to reach is the one the lecture set up about elites and fragility: the cargo proves both the astonishing reach of the system and its dependence on every link in a very long chain holding at once. Press the methodological question hard — the cargo records things no document would think to mention (an African log, a Baltic bead), while the letter records things no object preserves (trust, credit, fear). Each kind of evidence sees what the other is blind to. And ask what happens to a system this interconnected when the links begin to fail — which is exactly the collapse the next lecture opens with.
Task BMyth and commerce in one building — Ugarit
Ugarit was introduced in the lecture as the hub of the whole eastern network and the premier emporium of its age — and as something stranger and more important than a marketplace. In one building, the same trained scribes produced the commercial archive (contracts, loans, cargo disputes) and the Baal Cycle, the great storm-god poem in which Baal defeats the Sea. The task fastens onto that proximity. If myth and ledger came from the same hands, then cultural transmission may travel through trade rather than alongside it: the merchant who moved copper also carried stories, and those stories stand behind later Greek mythology. The groups should also weigh the Ugaritic alphabet — thirty signs, learnable in weeks — as a commercial technology whose efficiency mattered, and the ancestor of the alphabet the Greeks would adopt. The bridge to carry away: Ugarit fell around 1185 BCE, severing the direct route east, so the eastern inheritance reached Greece late and indirectly — a thread the mythology discussions pick up.
Task CA palace economy in one year — the Linear B archive at Pylos
Where Tasks A and B look outward at trade, this one looks inward at the machine that trade served. It turns on the Linear B tablets from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos — the richest single archive of the Mycenaean world, and, by a cruel accident, a complete one: the tablets were unbaked working notes for the current year only, never meant to be kept, and they survive solely because the fire that destroyed the palace around 1200 BCE baked them hard. We hold one year — the last — out of centuries. From that single year the groups can reconstruct an astonishing amount: a kingdom of some 2,000 square kilometres (twice the territory of classical Athens) split into two provinces, "this-side-of" and "beyond" Mount Aigaleon; sixteen district centres with named officials; tax assessments in fixed commodities; bronze levied from every district; flocks, smiths, and gangs of dependent women counted out by ration. Set a festival "recipe" tablet (Un 2 — barley, wine, oxen, and pigs gathered for the king's feast) beside the 2,854 drinking cups from a single palace pantry, and the redistributive economy becomes visible at the moment of consumption: not a market but a banquet, the calculated generosity by which a ruler bound his elite to the centre. The questions to press: what can quantified written records show that no excavation can — and what does it mean that we know all this only because the building burned? The forward link is the dark that follows: when the palaces fell, writing itself was lost, and Greece would not write again for four centuries.