José Luis Melena Jiménez is a peerless scholar of editing the texts written in the Mycenaean writing system of the late second millennium BCE and explicating their linguistic and “historical” contents.

This volume takes up problems of script and language representation and textual interpretation, ranging from the use of punctuation markers and numbers in the Linear B tablets and the values of specific signs, to personal names and place names reflecting the ethnic composition of Mycenaean society and the dialects spoken during the proto-Homeric period of the late Bronze Age. New insights are offered into Mycenaean furniture, war chariots, pictorial vases, land cultivation, arboriculture, and shrine areas. Other papers discuss wealth finance, prestige goods, the ideology of obligatory payment, long-puzzling tax impositions, and the inevitable collapse of the palatial economic and political systems.