Eritha

Eritha (Mycenaean Greek: 𐀁𐀫𐀲, syllabic transcription e-ri-ta, pronounced [ˈɛ.rɪ.tʰa]; fl. c. 1180 BCE) 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, near the palatial centre of Pylos.

Eritha
𐀁𐀫𐀲
Fresco from Mycenae probably depicting a goddess or priestess, c. 1250 – c. 1180 BCE.
Occupation(s)	Priestess, probably of Potnia, at Sphagianes
Years active	c. 1180 BCE
Known for	Dispute with the damos over the status of her landholdings

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 of Nestor at Pylos (c. 1180 BCE), Eritha was involved in a legal dispute over the status of her lands against the local damos, which represented the other landholders of Sphagianes. While the precise terms of the dispute are unclear, Eritha appears to have tried to argue that part of her landholdings were held on behalf of her deity, and consequently that she was entitled to lesser tax or other obligations than if they were her personal possession. The outcome of the dispute is unknown.

The record of Eritha's land dispute constitutes the longest preserved sentence of Mycenaean Greek and the first known 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 organisation and civic society, and for the legal systems and infrastructure that existed in the Pylian state.

Position in society

The remains of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, Messenia – the centre of the Pylian polity

Eritha is associated with the site of Sphagianes (Mycenaean Greek: 𐀞𐀑𐀊𐀛, syllabic transcription pa-ki-ja-ne) Sphagianes is known through the Linear B records of the Eb, Ep, En and Eo series, which record landholdings there. The site is believed to have been a religious centre near Pylos, dedicated to the goddess Potnia, who may have been a mother goddess and was possibly the chief goddess of the Pylian pantheon. Most of the landholders there, including Eritha, are described with titles associated with religious cult, particularly forty-six people labelled as "servants of the god".

Those, such as Eritha, identified by name in the Pylian tablets constitute around 2% of the estimated population of the polity. Dimitri Nakassis has argued that they represent "a broad elite group" within that polity. Eritha is one of two women named as religious figures, along with another named Karpathia, in the Pylos tablets. Both were based at Sphagianes; Eritha appears to have been the more important of the two. 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: indeed, this is one of few positions of power in which women are shown 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 control 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% of the land recorded on the Pylian Linear B tablets is 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 individual 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 unusual as a woman holding power over those designated as "slaves" or "servants": elsewhere, only men are listed as doing so. 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 drawing of the tablet PY Ep 704, on which Eritha's land dispute is recorded. Eritha's name can be read at the beginning of the fifth line.

The dispute over Eritha's land is recorded on two Linear B tablets. The first, PY Eb 297, is described by Nakassis as a "preliminary document", and was written by a high-ranking administrator known as Hand 41. The second, PY Ep 704, is written by Hand 1, considered the chief scribe of Pylos. The case is the earliest known 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:

Eritha the priestess holds an onaton plot of communal land from the damos, so much seed: WHEAT: 38.4 litres ... Eritha the priestess holds and claims to hold an etōnion plot for the god, but the damos says she holds an onaton plot of communal lands, so much seed: WHEAT 374.4 litres

— PY Ep 704, lines 3, 5–6.

The word onaton 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 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 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: indeed, 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 palace in which they happened to be: in the case of Pylos, this destruction happened late in the LH IIIB period, around the transition to LH IIIC (that is, c. 1200 – c. 1180 BCE). The surviving tablets from Pylos were found in the so-called "Archives Complex" at the Palace of Nestor. 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 damos (plural damoi) 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 damos referred to an administrative district, and also to the group of local administrators overseeing land allocations in that district. The local damos, 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 telestai. Land designated as "communal" was leased to individuals by the damos, and conferred obligations on the leaseholder with respect to the damos.

Rodney Castleden draws a contrast between priestesses like Eritha, whom he considers to have represented the social elite, and the damos, whom he considers to have been "ordinary people". The term "plot-holders" (ktoinohokhoi) was used by Hand 41 on PY Eb 297 to indicate Eritha's opponents, where damos was used by Hand 1 on PY Ep 704, leading to the suggestion that the landholders of Sphagianes either controlled the damos or were themselves equivalent to it. The names of twelve of these landholders are known: six are known to have been telestai, at least three were smiths, and one may have been a herdsman. Lupack, Deger-Jalkotzy and Michel Lejeune suggest that the "plot-holders" were a group or committee of damos members empowered to act on behalf of the wider damos. John Chadwick similarly considers that the collective voice of the damos was mediated through its largest landholders.

Nature of the dispute

Possible locations of some key sites within the Pylian state, c. 1180 BCE

As recorded on the tablet, Eritha claimed that the disputed plot was an etōnion, a term whose precise meaning is obscure. It is generally agreed that an etōnion was exempt from at least some of the tax levied upon land. According to Bennet and Shelmerdine, the substance of the dispute was that Eritha argued that the majority of her holdings were exempt from regular administrative obligations on the grounds of having religious status. Susan Lupack supports this view, suggesting that an etōnion was free of all obligations, including taxes. Nakassis suggests that an etōnion may have been required to pay no or fewer taxes to the damos than an onaton.

Michael Galaty suggests that, by categorising the land as being held "for the god", Eritha hoped to have it excluded from her property for the purposes of calculating tax obligations. Lupack suggests that categorising Eritha's holdings as an etōnion would mean that their production was considered in calculating how much tax was owed to the palatial administration, even though they would not be themselves liable to pay those taxes. She accepts Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy's belief that the damos as a whole was assessed and liable to pay taxes to the palace, and therefore that the other damos members would have to pay additional taxes, commensurate with the assessed value of Eritha's holdings, if the latter were categorised as exempt from taxation. Lupack suggests that the prospect of these additional requirements provoked the damos to object to Eritha's claim. Only three plots are listed as etōnion land in the Linear B tablets: Lupack suggests that these were gifts of the ruler (wanax), granted only rarely so as to avoid antagonising the damos.

Importance for Mycenaean studies

According to Nakassis, the dispute shows that religious institutions, such as the one with which Eritha was connected, were simultaneously involved with the palatial authority and at least partially independent of it. Bennet and Shelmerdine characterise the debate as a clash of "religious authority against the secular power of the damos". They argue that the tablet's inclusion in the palace archive of Pylos indicates that the palace ultimately had authority to adjudicate the dispute. At the same time, Nakassis judges that Eritha's claim to hold land "for the god" shows that her authority did not entirely derive from that of the palace.

Lupack writes that the existence of the dispute is "of great significance", in that it demonstrates that the damos was able to act as a unified legal entity, and that Eritha, as a priestess, was empowered to take legal action on behalf of her sanctuary and deity. Castleden suggests that the actions of the damos constitute a formal complaint by "ordinary people" against their social superiors, and so evidence that the hierarchy of Pylian society was "not overwhelmingly oppressive". Stefan Hiller, by contrast, considers Eritha to have been a member of the damos, and so the dispute to have been "not between palace and damos, but ... between an individual member of the damos and the damos community". Shelmerdine considers the damos to have held at least equal power to Eritha, and perhaps to have had the power to overrule her assessment of her land. She cites Eritha's dispute as an example of the "frictions" that could emerge between competing loci of religious, civic and royal power in Mycenaean society.

Deger-Jalkotzy suggests that the lack of a palatial decision in the dispute indicates that the palace saw such property disputes as a matter for the local community to resolve. Guy Middleton similarly suggests that the palace may have lacked any power or authority to involve itself in the matter, though Shelmerdine and Bennet argue that the presence of the dispute in the palatial archive indicates that "land tenure was ultimately under the control of the king’s central authority".

Philippa Steele has argued that the use in the Linear B tablets of verbs of speaking to describe the positions of Eritha and the damos indicates that legal business was conducted orally, rather than through written documentation, and its results recorded only in memory. Other archaeologists, such as Jean-Pierre Olivier, argue that legal documentation, such as records of laws, contracts and sales, was recorded on perishable materials, which are now lost. Thomas Palaima notes that the nature of Mycenaean land tenure and the obligations of taxation and service recorded in Linear B must have required judicial rulings and resolution, although no record of any has survived.

See also

• Mycenaean religion

Footnotes

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