#EOTalks

#EOTalks 14: “Not in any significant or proper sense… Greek”: Orientalism and the Mycenaeans by DIMITRI NAKASSIS
Abstract
Although the decipherment of Linear B as Greek in 1952 confirmed for some the essential unity of Hellenic prehistory and history, for others it illustrated the sharp break between the Bronze and Iron Ages. Moses Finley in particular argued vociferously that “Mycenaean society… was not Greek” “in any significant or proper sense,” and his interpretation has become historical orthodoxy, especially but not exclusively in Anglophone scholarship. In this paper, I examine the arguments deployed by Finley and his intellectual successors, and I argue that the underlying narrative is entirely Orientalist sensu Saïd.
Speaker
Dimitri Nakassis is professor and chair of the department of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (Brill 2013) and co-director of the Western Argolid Regional Project and the Pylos Tablets Digital Project.
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