Appendix One
and other rich Mycenaean regions, very obviously not everyone
emigrated. The evolution of LH me pottery into Submyce-
naean and Protogeometric is paralleled by continuity and de-
cline in all aspects of the material culture. 22 The continuity, I
would suggest, was provided by a lower class, mostly rural,
among whom Greek was seldom spoken, and then only as a
second language. After the death or departure of the town and
palace population, whose first language was certainly South
Greek, the Greek language may have almost disappeared from
what was once Mycenaean Greece.
That there were people in the palace states who spoke some-
thing other than Greek, even at the end of the Late Helladic
period, is suggested by the Linear B tablets. Almost a third of
the people who show up in the Pylos texts do not have Greek
names, and it is a reasonable inference that for them Greek was
at best a second language. In the Linear B tablets from Knos-
sos, almost half of the names seem to be non-Greek. Where in
society the individuals with non-Greek names were concen-
trated is not clear, but many of them certainly were at the
lower levels. 23
- On this continuity, see Desborough, The Last Mycenaeans, 225—
30, and Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece, 28ff. and 2<)6K.
- The entire question is unusually obscure. M. Ventris and
J. Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1956), 93, noted the presence of non-Greek names in the tablets but
attributed no significance to them: "certainly the names cannot be used to
support a theory that any language other than Greek was in actual use in
the Mycenaean kingdoms" (whether this statement was intended to apply
to fifteenth-century Crete is not clear). According to S. Hiller, "Personen-
namen," in Die friihgriechischen Texte aus mykenischer Zeit, ed. S. Hiller and
O. Panagl, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976) of the
almost two thousand names studied "insgesamt ca. 60% zufriedenstellend
gedeutet werden" (p. 246), which seems to imply (if an "intelligible" name
is synonymous with a Greek name) that ca. 60 percent of the names are
Greek (Hiller observes that the "deutbaren Personennamen" are 68 percent
of the total for Pylos, and 56 percent of the total for Knossos). Where the
people with non-Greek names were located in society is a question not ad-
dressed in M. Lindgren's The People of Pylos. Prosopographical and Methodologi-
2l8
