Pylos tablet Eo 269, wool carding and the production of wheat

Pylos tablet Eo 269, wool carding and the production of wheat:

Pylos tablet Eo 269 deals with both wool carding and the production of wheat (wheat crops). The person responsible for wool carding is Aktaoios, who is the owner of a settled plot of land. Note the emphasis on “settled”. The family lives on the land and off it. Aktaoios would therefore appear to be a well off farmer-land owner. The first occupation mentioned is wool carding, which implies the presence of (a lot of) sheep, even though sheep are not specifically mentioned on this tablet. With reference to the wheat crop, while we do not know exactly how much wheat the “unit of measurement” refers to, for the sake of convenience, let us say it is something like 1 hectares or 1 acre or something along those lines. It clearly was something along those lines, but no actual “proof” of the size of measured land upon which wheat was grown in Mycenaean times survives, as is to be expected. So we make an approximation. In any case, it is a lot of wheat, and he and his family would have had to do a lot of seeding to bring in such a rich crop. The Minoans and Mycenaeans (here at Pylos) appear to have been real experts at growing wheat, as it is often mentioned in large quantities on Linear B tablets from both Knossos and Pylos.

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