Eritha
Eritha was a Mycenaean priestess. She was a subject of the Mycenaean state of Pylos, in the southwestern Peloponnese, based at the cult site of Sphagianes. Sphagianes is believed to have been near the palatial centre of Pylos, and may have been located at modern Volimidia.
As a priestess, Eritha held an elevated position in Pylian society. She is the more prominent of the two priestesses known from Pylos, and held economic independence and social prominence unusual for women in the Pylian state. She held authority over several other people, including at least fourteen women who were probably assigned to her by the palatial state as servants to assist with the distribution of religious offerings.
In the last year before the destruction of the palace at Pylos, Eritha was involved in a legal dispute over the status of her lands against the local which represented the other landholders of Sphagianes. While the exact nature of the dispute is unclear, Eritha seems to have claimed that part of her land was held on behalf of her deity, and therefore subject to reduced taxes or obligations. The outcome of the dispute is unknown.
The record of Eritha's land dispute constitutes the longest preserved sentence of Mycenaean Greek and the oldest evidence of a legal dispute from Europe. It has been used as evidence for the status of women in the Mycenaean world, as well as for relations between the palace, religious organisations and civic society, and for the legal systems and infrastructure that existed in the Pylian state.
Position in society
By the time of Eritha's life at the end of the Bronze Age, Mycenaean states, such as Pylos in the southwestern Peloponnese, were centred on monumental buildings, known in modern scholarship as palaces. These palaces were themselves the centre of economic and political administration, and formed institutions which mobilised and redistributed resources within the polity. The most prominent individual within that polity was the king, or wanax, who exercised political authority, held a prominent religious role, and controlled large amounts of land, workers and resources. Administrators within the palatial apparatus kept records of economic and other activity on clay tablets, written in the Linear B script.File:Map of ancient Pylos-en.svg|alt=Map of the south-western Peloponnese: several sites, including Pylos, are labelled in Linear B, ancient Greek and English.|thumb|upright=1.5|The southwestern Peloponnese, showing possible locations of some key sites within the Pylian stateIn the Linear B records, Eritha is associated with the site of Sphagianes. Sphagianes is known through the tablets categorised by modern scholars into the Eb, Ep, En and Eo series, which record landholdings at the site. It is believed to have been a religious centre near Pylos, and may have shared a location with the large cemetery at Volimidia, around northeast of the palace at Pylos. Most of the landholders at Sphagianes, including Eritha, are described with titles associated with religious cult, particularly forty-six people labelled as "servants of the god". The site was dedicated to the goddess Potnia, who may have been a mother goddess and was possibly the chief goddess of the Pylian pantheon.Those identified by name in the Pylian tablets, such as Eritha, constitute around 2 per cent of the estimated population of the polity. Dimitri Nakassis has argued that they represent "a broad elite group" within it. Eritha is one of two women named as holding religious office, along with another named Karpathia. Both were based at Sphagianes; Eritha appears to have been the more important of the two. Guy Middleton has argued that Eritha may have been a member of an aristocratic or royal family, but equally may have owed her authority to a religious system with little direct correspondence to the ruling palatial system. Religious organisations in the Pylian state were involved in economic activities, particularly the manufacture of bronze, and had at least some economic independence from the palatial authority.
Priestesses held positions of power in Mycenaean society, and religion is one of few spheres in which women are shown as holding authority in Mycenaean art. They received economic and administrative privileges, and carried out civic functions as well as religious ones, such as animal sacrifice. Of all the women listed on the Pylian Linear B tablets, Eritha and Karpathia controlled the largest amount of material goods. Barbara Olsen has described them as the most important women mentioned in the records of either Pylos or the site of Knossos on Crete. Priestesses are shown as having control over land, men, women and material goods, including textiles. Olsen notes that the religious sphere is an exception to the usually male-dominated nature of Pylian society, writing that "only the institution of religion could trump gender", and that the religion appears to have been the only mechanism for women to obtain economic autonomy. At Pylos, it is rare to find evidence of women having control over land or being involved in economic activities monitored by the palace, though women were more prominent in both areas at Knossos. Only 5 per cent of the land recorded on the Pylian Linear B tablets was held by women, and no women without religious offices are recorded as landholders. Cult officials are also the only women, bar one, to be listed without reference to their marital or child-bearing status.
Another woman at Sphagianes, by the name of Huamia, is listed on the tablet PY Ep 704 as a "servant of the god" and as holding land given to her as a "gift of honour" by a priestess. Nakassis infers that this priestess is likely to be Eritha, who is named on the following line of the same tablet. Joan Breton Connelly has suggested that those designated as servants of the god had the role of assisting Eritha in her duties. While the specific nature of these priestly duties is not recorded by the palace, Eritha is the only woman listed as holding power over those designated as "slaves" or "servants". The tablet PY Ae 303 lists at least fourteen women, designated as "servants of the priestess", possibly assigned to Eritha by the palace to help with the distribution of gold as religious offerings.
Land dispute
A dispute over Eritha's land is recorded on two Linear B tablets. The first, PY Eb 297, is described by Nakassis and by Thomas Palaima as a "preliminary document", and was written by a high-ranking administrator known as Hand 41. The second, PY Ep 704, was written by Hand 1, considered the chief scribe of Pylos; Palaima calls this the "final recension" of the matter. The tablets represent the oldest known evidence of a legal dispute from Europe.PY Ep 704 records Eritha's landholdings in the following lines. These constitute the longest preserved sentence of Mycenaean Greek, and the only record of a judicial dispute in the Linear B corpus:
The word referred to a standard allotment of land. The land in dispute – the second allotment mentioned in the tablet – is described by Nakassis as fairly large by Pylian standards. The term described a category of landholding: its precise meaning is unclear. The palace appears to have made no decision to settle the dispute.
Date
Linear B tablets were written on clay and retained for at most a year. Their contents may, in normal circumstances, have been transferred to other materials such as papyrus for long-term storage. It is thought that the clay tablets would normally have been discarded after such a transfer was complete, and in any case that they were not generally intended to be archived or kept for an extended period: the site of Pylos is unusual in providing evidence for the systematic sorting and storage of these tablets.Linear B tablets were not intentionally fired, but were left to dry in the sun. Those Linear B tablets which survive today were accidentally fired during the destruction by fire of the structure in which they happened to be. In the case of the palace at Pylos, this destruction happened late in the LH IIIB period, around the transition to LH IIIC, and is dated to. Most of the surviving tablets from Pylos were found in the so-called "Archives Complex" at the palace. Given that the tablets were normally retained for less than a year, Eritha's legal dispute must have taken place within months before the palace's destruction.
The ''damos''
The term in Linear B is used for quasi-independent village communities within the lands of the palatial state. John Bennet and Cynthia Shelmerdine suggest that the word referred to an administrative district, and also to the group of local administrators overseeing land allocations in that district. The local, rather than the palace, is generally taken to have controlled all the land at Sphagianes recorded on the Linear B tablets, and therefore to have been able to call upon the service of its land-holding supervisors, known as. Land designated as "communal" was leased to individuals by the, and conferred obligations on the leaseholder with respect to the.Rodney Castleden draws a contrast between priestesses like Eritha, whom he considers to have represented the social elite, and the, whom he considers to have been "ordinary people". The term "plot-holders" was used by Hand 41 on PY Eb 297 to indicate Eritha's opponents, where was used by Hand 1 on PY Ep 704, leading to the suggestion that the landholders of Sphagianes either controlled the or were themselves equivalent to it. The names of twelve of these landholders are known: six are known to have been, at least three were smiths, and one may have been a herdsman. Susan Lupack, Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy and Michel Lejeune suggest that the "plot-holders" were a group or committee of members empowered to act on behalf of the wider. John Chadwick similarly considers that the largest landholders in the spoke on its behalf.