Not all Pylian slaves were native to Pylos. Groups of women and children, almost certainly slaves who carried out work for the kingdom, are registered in the Aa, Ab, and Ad series. In the tablets, the women are commonly referred to by adjectives derived from place-names. With comparable groups of female slaves in Knosos these adjectives in all clear cases are derived from place-names which lie within the kingdom. In Pylos, however, some of these adjectives are derived from place-names outside of the kingdom.
For example, there are women called Lamniai (from Lemnos), Milatiai (from Miletus), and Knidiai (from Cnidus), after places which lie along the western coast of Asia Minor. It is unlikely that Pylian administrators purchased these women in a slave market such as existed on the island of Delos in classical times, since, if this were the case, the women ought not all to have come from the same geographical region and similar groups of foreign-born slaves should have existed in Mycenaean kingdoms other than Pylos. In all likelihood, then, these women were captured in a plundering raid. Since these women were being kept at Pylos together with their children, the majority of the women must have been of approximately the same age; and therefore must have fallen victim to the raiders at about the same time.
It seems, then, that at some point within the last generation of the kingdom, the Pylians carried out a great raid along the coast of western Anatolia and captured groups of women and children to work as slaves. Interestingly the Homeric epics, in particular the Iliad, tell the story of a great expedition from the Greek mainland against a king in western Anatolia, Priam of Troy. The Pylian slave-raid may provide part of the historical context before which this (highly fictionalized) story arose.
World History
