The text below is meant to be read aloud at the start of the discussion section. It compresses the week's lecture into a few minutes and hands the room to the three tasks. The fuller notes that follow are for setting each task up in turn.
This week’s lecture opens with an archive, not a story. Linear B tablets from Pylos, Knossos, and Thebes already name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Ares, and Dionysus — most of the later Olympian pantheon — five centuries before Hesiod or Homer wrote a line about any of them. The same archive shows something else: a Pylos tablet records a dispute between a priestess and the local damos over temple land — the longest connected sentence in Mycenaean Greek, evidence of a religious world split between palace, temple, and community, not run from one throne.
Centuries earlier still, on Crete and at Akrotiri on Thera, the sacred figures are goddesses, not gods. Linear A cannot be read, so no name survives, but the images are unambiguous: snake-holding figures at Knossos, and at Akrotiri the Xeste 3 frescoes, where women gather saffron and bring it to a goddess enthroned beside a leashed griffin — the closest thing Aegean art has to a fixed divine symbol. Whether this is one goddess wearing many guises or several distinct figures tied to different places and rites is a live scholarly argument, not a settled fact.
That same leashed griffin turns up again two centuries later on the mainland, on gold rings buried in 2015 with a Mycenaean man at Pylos — the “Griffin Warrior.” His weapons lay on one side of the grave, his rings and seals on the other, as though the mundane and the divine were kept apart. He held this authority at least two centuries before any tablet uses the word wanax, “king” — raising the question of whether the office existed before the word for it, or we simply cannot yet see it.
The tablets that do use divine names hold a further surprise: Poseidon, not Zeus, has the strongest Bronze Age profile — land, a consort, cult epithets, a feast that fed hundreds — while Zeus’s own cult is smaller, tied to one Cretan mountain. The story that makes Zeus king only crystallises five centuries later, in Hesiod, borrowing its whole architecture — a sky-god deposed by his own son, a monstrous last challenger — from myths already old in Hatti and Ugarit. The Greek version differs in how it ends: Zeus secures his throne not by defeating Typhon alone but by swallowing Metis and marrying Themis, incorporating female power rather than simply defeating it.
The three tasks pick up these three kinds of evidence in turn — a fresco, a grave, and an administrative archive — and none of them is a story. Hold one question across all three: what can each kind of evidence let us know, and what does it conceal?
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Setting up the three tasks
Each task pairs a primary source or object with a scholarly argument central to Lecture 4; together they move from the oldest images of the gods, through the clearest trace of Bronze Age political power, to the puzzle of how Zeus actually becomes king. Each was signalled in the lecture. The notes here draw the line between that framing and the work the groups will do.
Task AOne Goddess, or Many? The Xeste 3 Frescoes and the “Great Goddess” Debate
This task opens the sequence because it handles the oldest evidence of the three, and the only evidence with no text attached to it at all. Groups set the Xeste 3 fresco programme — the saffron-gatherers, the enthroned goddess, the leashed griffin at her side — beside Nanno Marinatos’s argument against a single universal “Minoan Great Goddess,” which favours several distinct goddesses tied to specific places and rites instead. The decisive move is recognising what images alone can and cannot decide: without a legible text naming her, “one goddess or many” may not be a question the evidence can settle at all. Keep the griffin in mind — it reappears, worn by a very different body, in Task B.
Task BA King Before the Word “King”: the Griffin Warrior’s Grave
This task follows the same leashed-griffin imagery from Task A onto the mainland, into a grave excavated only in 2015. Groups work from the grave’s own arrangement — weapons on one side, rings and seal-stones on the other — and from Stocker and Davis’s argument that its occupant may represent an early, pre-literate wanax. The task turns on how much weight grave goods alone can bear: can religious imagery demonstrate political office, or only wealth, status, or personal taste? The forward link is the missing word itself — wanax does not appear in writing for at least two more centuries, exactly the gap Task C’s tablets and myths try to close.
Task CThe Rise of Zeus: an Administrative Record and a Literary One
The last task closes the lecture’s arc by setting two very different kinds of source against each other: the Linear B tablets that make Poseidon, not Zeus, the best-attested Mycenaean god, and Hesiod’s Theogony, written five centuries later, which makes Zeus king through a succession myth borrowed wholesale from Hatti and Ugarit. Groups should weigh both findings together — a Bronze Age administrative record and an Iron Age literary one — and ask what actually changed in between, and how much of that change this evidence can really explain. The forward link is the lecture’s own: the script that would one day let someone finally write wanax down is the subject of next week’s lecture, on writing, scripts, and alphabets.