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Pylos

Accepted11/12HighMainland GreeceHomeric name(s): Πύλος

Nestor's kingdom, and the Homeric palace we can actually walk through: the Late Bronze Age complex at Ano Englianos, whose Linear B archive survived because the building burned.

Telemachus sails to Pylos in Book 3 of the Odyssey and finds Nestor sacrificing on the shore. The Iliad's catalogue gives Nestor ninety ships, the second-largest contingent. Both point at a major Messenian power, and one was found: a palace on the ridge at Ano Englianos with a throne room, a bathtub, storerooms and an archive of more than a thousand clay tablets.

The tablets are administrative — rations, offerings, personnel — and they are in Greek, which is the single most consequential thing the site has told us. They do not mention Nestor or the war, and their world is a bureaucracy the poems never describe.

Nearby, the Griffin Warrior tomb excavated from 2015 has added a rich early Mycenaean burial to the picture, further tying the area to the period the poems remember.

Identifications proposed

  • Ano Englianos (the Palace of Nestor)

    Proposed by: Carl W. Blegen (1939)

    Accepted11/12High

    Blegen found Linear B tablets on the first day of excavation in 1939 and eventually a well-preserved Late Bronze Age palace, burnt around 1200 BCE. The archive names a place and an administration; it does not name Nestor. The palace is the strongest candidate for Homeric Pylos, and the identification rests on scale, date and location rather than on an inscription.

    37.0278, 21.6953· Site

    • ArchaeologyCarl W. Blegen and Marion Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia, vol. I (Princeton, 1966)
    • ScholarshipMichael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge, 1956)
    • ArchaeologyJack L. Davis and Sharon R. Stocker, the Griffin Warrior tomb at Pylos, University of Cincinnati excavations (from 2015)
    Confidence
    11/12 · High confidence
    Textual
    3
    Archaeological
    3
    Scholarly
    3
    Geographic
    2

  • A Triphylian or Elean Pylos

    Proposed by: Strabo, Geography 8.3

    Speculative4/12Low

    Antiquity already argued about which Pylos Nestor ruled: Strabo reports rival claims from Triphylia and Elis further north. The dispute is old, real, and now largely settled by excavation rather than by argument.

    37.5500, 21.6500· Region

    • Primary textStrabo, Geography 8.3
    • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
    Confidence
    4/12 · Low confidence
    Textual
    1
    Archaeological
    1
    Scholarly
    1
    Geographic
    1

Why this class

Accepted: an excavated Bronze Age palace of the right scale, date and region, with a scholarly consensus behind the identification. Geographic scores 2 rather than 3 because the Odyssey's sailing details and the exact harbour arrangements do not resolve cleanly.

What is disputed

Which bay Telemachus landed in, whether the ancient dispute over the location of Nestor's Pylos preserves a real memory of more than one Pylos, and how a palace bureaucracy in Linear B relates to the heroic society of the poems.

Sources

  • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
  • Primary textHomer, Odyssey (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1919)
  • ArchaeologyCarl W. Blegen and Marion Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia, vol. I (Princeton, 1966)
  • ScholarshipMichael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge, 1956)
  • ArchaeologyJack L. Davis and Sharon R. Stocker, the Griffin Warrior tomb at Pylos, University of Cincinnati excavations (from 2015)
  • Primary textStrabo, Geography 8.3