| This work focuses on the relations of dominance as they are demonstrated in the Linear B archives of Mainland Greece (Pylos, Tiryns, Mycenae, and Thebes) and discusses whether the social status of the "slave" can be ascribed to any social group or individual. The analysis of the Linear B tablets demonstrates that, among the lower-status people, a social group that has been generally treated by scholars as internally undifferentiated, there were differentiations in social status and levels of dependence. A set of conditions that have been recognized as being of central importance to the description of the "slave" status serve as the "unit of measurement", by which the different statuses can be correlated to the slave status. Of great importance for this work is the examination of a group of people designated as do-e-ro(-a), who have traditionally been interpreted as "slaves." This thesis, however, is not limited to these do-e-ro(-a), but takes into consideration the entire dependent and lower-status population in the tablets, distinguishes social groups of different levels of ranking and compares these groups both internally and against the criteria describing "slaves." Finally, a further goal of the discussion concerns the extent to which the different palatial sites on mainland Greece were similarly socially structured. |
