Talk:Eritha

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Eritha/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 19:25, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Iazyges (talk · contribs) 17:12, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Looks like a fascinating article, will take on the review. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 17:12, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Criteria

GA Criteria

GA Criteria:

• 1

  1.a Y

  1.b Y

• 2

  2.a Y

  2.b Y

  2.c Y

  2.d Y

• 3

  3.a Y

  3.b Y

• 4

  4.a Y

• 5

  5.a Y

• 6

  6.a Y

  6.b Y

• No DAB links Y
• No dead links Y replaced one dead URL with a live URL to chapter PDF.
• No missing citations Y
• Passes spot checks Y Checked #7, #25 & #45 (Lupack 2011, p. 208., Nakassis 2013, p. 171 & Galaty 2018, p. 162.), no issues.

Prose Suggestions

Please note that almost all of these are suggestions, and can be implemented or ignored at your discretion. Any changes I deem necessary for the article to pass GA standards I will bold.

• Eritha is one of two women named as religious figures, along with another named Karpathia, in the Pylos tablets. perhaps Eritha, along with another woman named Karpathia, are named as religious figures in the Pylos tablets.
  • I don't think this would quite get the point across: it matters that there were two, but it also matters that there were only (exactly) two. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:41, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
• In the Position in society section, by my reading (and understanding of the period), it looks like we're describing a Palace economy; you may wish to add a link to that, perhaps at the ruling palatial system bit, or perhaps even a short more explicit discussion as to what the general economic system looked like, before contrasting it with the role of women in it.
  • I've added the link a bit further down. Honestly, the traditional idea of a "palace economy" for Mycenaean Greece is a bit overstated, and tends to come about when people put too much weight on the Linear B tablets (which were written by/for the palace and record what the palace cared to record: not surprisingly, the picture they paint makes the palace look more important than it probably was!), and I'm not sure this is really the right place for a thorny discussion of how the Mycenaean economy worked. We get across the idea that religious associations had a complicated but not entirely subordinate economic and political relationship to the palace, which I think is the essential bit. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:41, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
• The dispute over Eritha's land is recorded on two Linear B tablets. perhaps reorganize this to Eritha was involved in a dispute over land, recorded on two Linear B tablets.
  • I've changed the "The" to an "A", but it's pretty definitely her land: the question of the dispute wasn't who owned it, but in what capacity Eritha owned it (and therefore, probably, what sort of obligations she owed as a result). UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:41, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
• @UndercoverClassicist: that is all of my suggestions. A fascinating article; I will hope to see it at FAC sometime. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 08:10, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
  • Thank you for the review -- replies above. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:41, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

"Seed wheat"?

Interesting article, but I'm a bit puzzled by the tablet's transcription:

...so much seed: WHEAT 374.4 litres.

I guess this gives the size of the field in question, expressed in units of grain seeds required to sow it, but I don't know. Can anyone shed some light?

Also, the precision of "374.4 l" is misleading, and it doesn't translate to a readily understandable unit (like acres or such), so I think it would be better to leave to original measurement in there ("20 buckets", or whatever that would have been.) And why is "WHEAT" capitalized?

Anybody know? --Syzygy (talk) 08:02, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Essentially, you're right -- the Mycenaeans measured land by the quantity of seed that would be required to sow it. We could do "X units", but that wouldn't give a modern reader any sense of how much this actually was, since the units in question aren't e.g. buckets, bushels, kilograms: they're just "units". Mycenaean ideograms (characters which stand for words) are conventionally transcribed in capitals. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:37, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying that -- should the info go into the article as well? It would be nice to have an idea to what the liters of wheat (roughly) translate. --Syzygy (talk) 15:35, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

At the moment, I reckon the best way to do it would be to revert the transcription to "X units", with a footnote to say "X units is approximately equivalent to Y litres, or Z acres". I'll need to look at some sources to put that calculus together, though. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 15:37, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Noting for the record that I decided on a different approach here: the sources overwhelmingly gave litres directly in their translations, so I have followed suit. However, I've added an EFN that explains what that actually means, with a tentative estimate that has been put forward for converting litres into acres. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:13, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

Damos

The word is etymologically identical to demos as in 'democracy', right? This should probably be mentioned. 62.73.72.101 (talk) 04:04, 12 August 2025 (UTC)