Mycenaean (Standardization)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>Doesn't "everyday" time become "historic time?"

-- not in the frame we're discussing.

Almost all our Mycenaean documents come from the end of the Mycenaean period,
literally -- from the destruction level of the great palaces, clay tablets
preserved by the fires that burned them down.

In fact, they're monthly tallies.  Evidently the Mycenaeans used clay for
running totals and then transfered the information to some other medium, one
that hasn't survived.  (We know this because while the extant tablets concern
only a short period, there are references to the previous year's records on
them.)

And the entire period of Mycenaean literacy was barely 200-250 years, by the
way.  Possibly less.

>English encountered this with the word "cattle" where dialect came to use it
>to refer to only to livestock

-- ah... you are aware that most early IE languages used the same word for
"cattle" and "wealth in general"?  Eg., the origins of "pecunium"?  Herds =
wealth.