Dimitri Nakassis Biography

Dimitri Nakassis is a classicist transforming our understanding of prehistoric Greek societies. His rare intellectual breadth comprising philology archaeology and contemporary social and economic theory has equipped Nakassis to challenge the long-held view that Late Bronze Age Mycenaean palatial society (1400–1200 BC) was a highly centralized oligarchy quite distinct from the democratic city-states of classical Greece.
Instead he proposes that power and resources were more broadly shared. This thesis developed in his first book Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (2013) is derived from a meticulous reinterpretation of Pylos’s administrative and accounting records (found on clay tablets and written in the early Greek script Linear B). Standard interpretations of the tablets suppose a rigid political structure in which a small group of palace elites controlled and distributed all resources. Nakassis re-examined this model using a traditional method prosopography but through the lens of contemporary theoretical discussions of agency and structure. He determined that some recurrences of a personal name refer to the same individual playing multiple sometimes competing roles. This insight offers an alternative picture of the Mycenaean world as a more open society with a dynamic and competitive economic structure that displays some similarities to the democratic polis of classical Greece.

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