Middle and Late Bronze Age Metal Tools from the Aegean, Eastern ...

due in large part to 1) palatial livestock holdings (roughly 80,000‒100,000 different
animals are recorded in the Knossos tablets, while 30,000‒40,000 sheep are mentioned at
Pylos) but also to 2) flax cultivation and the accompanying production of linen. 268
Tzachili described the relationship between rearing livestock and the successful
production of textiles: “The Knossos palace was apparently the centre of a huge flock-
rearing enterprise. It assembled wool, made a detailed record of it, and distributed it to
dependent workers, who returned it in the form of finished textiles.” 269 The Linear B
tablets at Knossos and Pylos also chronicle numerous female textile workers. At Knossos,
the Ak tablets document over 500 women, and Killen, taking into account the
fragmentary nature of the corpus of tablets, suggested that there may have been close to
1000 originally. The numbers are equally impressive at Pylos, where 639 women are
recorded and a total number around 750 is imagined. 270
Many of the industries under the direction of the palaces, like textile production,
would have incorporated decentralized activities, as Galaty and Parkinson assert: “…even
the most centralized and controlled of Mycenaean industries would have depended at
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least in part on exchanges that were difficult or impossible to control fully.”
Subsequently, Galaty and Parkinson hypothesize that weaving tools and signs of textile
production may be dispersed “throughout the hinterlands of Mycenaean states,” which
may or may not correlate to the Linear B records about the industry. Yet the level of
control and detailed accounts of the dispersed bronze smiths in the Jn series tablets
268
Tzachili 2001b, 179; Trantalidou 2001, 268; Rougemont 2007.
269
Tzachili 2001a,168.
270
Killen 2001, 172.
271
Galaty and Parkinson 2007, 5.
110