American Journal of Archaeology

The cleaning, restudy, conservation, and reassembly of the Nike of Samothrace in 2013–2014 have prompted several new proposals as to its topographical context, date, and function. This article seeks to clarify some fundamental issues about the statue itself; the socle and ship’s prow on which it stood; an associated inscription; the precinct and edifice in and around which they were found; and last but not least, their relation to the sanctuary as a whole. These clarifications should enable future work to proceed on a firmer basis than hitherto.

A wide variety of edits can be identified in the Linear B administrative documents from Mycenaean Greece. The writers of these documents (the Mycenaean scribes) can be seen to have made changes to their texts by erasing, rewriting, or adding signs, words, or whole entries. The edits include not only correcting errors and updating information (as might be expected for these administrative documents) but also a wide variety of changes that affect the texts’ presentation rather than their content, such as alterations to their layout, textual structure, and orthography, and even the forms of individual signs. By analyzing these edits and the motivations behind them, this article sheds light on the priorities of the Mycenaean scribes in creating and using their administrative documents and the choices they made in the process of doing so. The results demonstrate that despite these records’ short-term nature (tablets were kept for no longer than a year) they were not merely rough or preliminary texts over which relatively little care was taken but were active documents designed for ongoing use and consultation within the Mycenaean palatial administrations’ yearly administrative cycles.

This article rethinks the presence of the lion in Bronze Age Crete and its participation in poetic culture in the Aegean. In the absence of living lions on the island, representational embodiments were the basis of people’s encounters with the species, and the peculiarities of these object-bodies powerfully contributed to the characterization of the beast. Throughout the Bronze Age, the vast majority of Cretan lion representations occurred in glyptic. Seals were worn on persons’ bodies, consistently placing the leonine in direct relation to the human; this juxtaposition had both physical and cultural dimensions and was invigorated by the spatiotemporal dynamism of seal use. This paralleling of human and beast is considered in its lived context, including its likely relationship to oral traditions, especially the comparison formulated by similes. In the period from Middle Bronze III to Late Bronze II, after centuries of development in Crete, the lion’s association with glyptic extended to the early Mycenaean mainland. This was a moment of intense intra-Aegean sharing that had linguistic, practical, and material dimensions and that likely saw the birth of the epic tradition. I argue that the beast’s persistent position in glyptic contributed to the formulation of Aegean poetic culture, configuring a lasting but fluid parallel between lions and humans.