Rural Economy
- Created by: Ruthfeath
- Created on: 19-05-18 09:12
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- Rural Economy
- Greek Landscape
- Coastal marshes & extensive forests
- Greater variety of wildlife - hares, red deer, roe deer, turtles, wild boars
- Hills with vast amounts of oak wood and other trees, such as pine, olive & fig
- Agricultural Society
- Most Mycenaeans involved in highly organised agriculture
- Majority of people lived in rural areas
- Towns relied on countryside for food, labour & materials, as well as for political & military support
- Linear B records deliveries of wool to palaces - wool production in countryside important
- Flax also an important crop, tablets record huge quantities of olive oil being produced
- Majority of crops consumed locally for subsistence, but large surpluses were being produced for exporting
- Food Production
- Cereals were staple crops
- Rations given out to workers as form of payment - particularly barley
- Female slaves of Pylos also seem to have been given figs
- Wheat & barley were an important crop
- Meals made interesting with spices & herbs - coriander, mint, basil, olive oil
- Wild foods also consumed - almonds, cherries, pistachios
- Large surplus of olive oil for export - major source of wealth
- Vines grown for wine production
- Perfume makers likely to have worked out of the villages - high-status craft
- Flax fields worked by slave women, large quantities given to army to use for linen in clothes or sails
- Many people involved in processing flax - at Pylos, 200 women recorded as making cloth
- Farming must have been full-time activity for many - surplus of crops allowed emergence of full time specialist craft workers & development of town life
- Intensive Farming
- Lake Copais drained when citadel of Gla built on an island above what had been shallow water & swamp
- Drained land was converted to farmland & cultivated
- Drainage of lake was major job - series of look-out posts & forts built to overlook & protect the plain
- Gla was perhaps the headquarters of officials responsible for managing & maintaining the agricultural system
- Animal-Rearing
- Oxen widely reared - used in small numbers in each agricultural community
- Pylos tablets record that 234 oxhides were provided every year by the countryside to the palace
- Majority of food eaten locally - not entered the palaces or their records
- Limited amount of produce recorded by tablets
- Cattle often used for sacrifice - not all reared for economic reasons
- Horses only associated with the elite
- First representations of horses appear on the grave stones for shaft graves, harnessed to chariots
- Horse harnesses also often shown in frescoes
- Horse trading may have been a major source of great wealth in the Argolid
- Goats kept for their hair, meat & milk, which was made into cheese
- Pigs reared & used for meat & other products such as leather
- Oxen widely reared - used in small numbers in each agricultural community
- Hunting
- Wild boar hunted - between 30-70 boars' tusks needed to make boars' tusk helmet, which must have been a prestige object
- Elite seem to have loved hunting from chariot or on foot, often with packs of dogs - dogs showed in frescoes
- Hunting produced food from variety of animals - deer, hare, duck, goose
- Lion hunting was also a dangerous sport - bones of lions found at Tiryns & Kastanas
- Boar Hunt Fresco, Tiryns
- Untitled
- Houses
- Usually simple rectangular structures with stone footings, mudbrick walls & ridge roofs - they had a single door at one end
- Developed into an apsidal design - had semi-circular annex at inner end, partitioned off to make sleeping area
- Often an open porch at the entrance
- Small triangular windows made into the walls
- Ridge roofs of ordinary houses were probably covered with brushwood smeared with wet clay - higher status building were probably tiled
- People lived in small villages & large areas of Greece must have had this dispersed settlement - foothills of mountains were popular locations
- Association with palace centres
- Complex system of assessment used to determine how much of each product was owed to the urban centres
- Palace centres seemed to have wanted particular products more, such as wool, wheat barley & oil - they were seen as taxes to the palace centres & were called offerings
- Not certain if the administrators in the palace centres controlled all the agricultural production but it is likely that they only controlled a small part with the majority consumed in the countryside
- Economy in the palaces
- Significant proportion of the economy revolved around the palace centres
- Each centre had one of these complexes which contained its own internal economy
- Palaces also involved in number of prestige activities including providing food for festivals, exports, gifts to local elites & offerings to the gods
- At least 8,500 pottery vessels were in use at the Pylos palace and one room off the main court contained 600 drinking cups
- Greek Landscape
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