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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Eritha/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Gog the Mild via FACBot (talk) 29 May 2025 .

Eritha


Nominator(s): UndercoverClassicist T·C 20:26, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This article was an interesting and tricky one to put together. There are probably two real-life figures from the Aegean Bronze Age (with apologies to Agamemnon) that we can really write about as rounded human beings, and Eritha is one of them. She was a priestess, probably of the goddess Potnia, who worked near the Mycenaean citadel of Pylos in the last year before that palace was destroyed by fire. Quite by chance, the blaze preserved records of her name in the palatial administration's accounts, which also give us the oldest known testimony of a legal dispute on the European continent.

The direct evidence base for Eritha and her life is minuscule: this article therefore has to do a lot more "building up" than would normally be necessary in a biography, particularly around apparently simple questions like "when did she live?" and "what was her job?" I have tried to strike a balance here, aiming to avoid digressing while making sure that the essential context to understand what we do know about her life is given, following what the grown-up academics include when bringing her into their discussions. Similarly, I have tried to keep things comprehensible while not shying away from the arcane questions of philology that are unfortunately essential to any discussion of the dispute that brings her into the historical record. The article underwent a GA review by Iazyges in January, for which I am grateful. UndercoverClassicist T·C 20:26, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ImaginesTigers

Interesting topic! I didn't know she existed; I only know the creme de la creme and the firestarters, apparently I'll do some spot checks given UC's track record of successful nominations. I will spot-check 10% of the total references General questions

  • I can't see the method for which sources are linked vs which aren't – e.g., Deger-Jalkotzy (1988) has a Google Books link, as does Finlayson (2013), but there isn't one for Bennet (2013) or Benet & Shelmerdine (2008).

Spotchecks

  • Linear B tablets were written on clay and retained for at most a year.[36]
  • Bennet (2001) is a bit dense so I struggled to find this. Got it, though! I think the article expresses a little more certainty than Bennet does ("implies"), but passes.
  • Linear B tablets were written on clay and retained for at most a year.[36]
  • Salgarella (2020) refers back to Bennet and uses more authoritative language, so that's a double pass
  • Those identified by name in the Pylian tablets, such as Eritha, constitute around 2% of the estimated population of the polity. Dimitri Nakassis has argued that they represent "a broad elite group" within it.[7]
  • Pass.
  • Eritha appears to have been the more important of the two.[10]
  • Pass
  • Priestesses are shown as having control over land, men, women and material goods, including textiles.[8]
  • Pass – I do wonder if it might be helpful to clarify, as the source does, that we aren't quite sure what ownership entails within the context of this society. It'd make for an interesting footnote?
  • I've tried to hedge it with "having control over": you're right that the concept of "property" may not be helpful here (and, confusingly, there are people in the social picture called "owners" who are a completely different thing). At the moment I'm not sure a footnote would clarify or add much. UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:18, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Land designated as "communal" was leased to individuals by the damos, and conferred obligations on the leaseholder with respect to the damos.[11]
  • Pass.

Give me a ping when you respond. Engaging work, thank you — ImaginesTigers (talk) 21:37, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ImaginesTigers: thanks for the review. I've taken out the Google Books links, for consistency -- we now only have links where the full text appears online and is accessible by means other than the DOI, JSTOR or other named parameter. Happy to add any that I've missed. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:17, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Support on sourcing. Ping me if a prose review is needed down the line. Thank you for the work — ImaginesTigers (talk) 21:28, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi ImaginesTigers, just checking whether this is a pass on a source review as well as on the spot check? Thanks. Gog the Mild (talk) 20:58, 29 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Gog the Mild: Very straightforward pass on both Gog — ImaginesTigers (talk) 23:26, 29 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

images - pass

  • img1: is it the case that the lede image only possible depicts Eritha?, license good, caption good, consider changing alt to Painting of a woman with skin rendered in white, holding up two bundles of grain
    • I don't want to go as far as "possibly of Eritha" -- although Mycenaean painting is remarkably standardised between sites and over time in its visual idiom, this one's from Mycenae rather than Pylos, and may not be quite contemporary with her. However, it's as close as we're going to get: I think it has encyclopaedic value in showing how a person like Eritha was depicted/visualised in her society, and the flipside of Mycenaean painting being so stylised is that we can say pretty confidently that a portrait of Eritha would look like that if one existed. Done on the alt. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:26, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • img2: license good, caption ok but consider linking polity, consider changing alt to: Photograph of Mycenaean ruins, showing the foundations of a wall
  • img3: awesome svg, license good, caption good, remove fullstop from alt
  • img4: where is that map in present day terms?, license good, i would like present day loc in caption if known, alt good but rmv fullstop

Borsoka

  • By the time of Eritha's life... I would add the century.
    • I've gone for "at the end of the Bronze Age", since she was alive around the transition between the C13th and C12th, but we don't know how old she was and therefore how much of her life covered either one. These dates are all a bit fuzzy anyway! UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:35, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is believed to have been a religious centre near Pylos.... I would be more specific: "Archeological evidence and written sources indicate that...", or something similar.
    • Ha -- if only! Honestly, it's little more than well-established (and generally accepted) guesswork. The place seems to be important to the palace, and there's clearly some flow of people and goods between the two, so it would make sense for it to have been vaguely nearby. Similarly, there's a cemetery site not too far from Pylos at Volimidia, which has a lot of tombs despite not really seeming that impressive otherwise, so that gets hypothesised as a religious site because... tombs are kinda/maybe religious? We don't know anything about the links between Mycenaean religion and funerary habits, and the patterns as to where they put their tombs are complicated and pretty clearly involve lots of competing priorities. The best guess is that Sphagianes is Volimidia, but it's entirely a guess, and there's no real evidence behind it. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:48, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • ..., who may have been a mother goddess and was possibly the chief goddess of the Pylian pantheon. She was a mother goddess according to the relevant article.
    • The relevant article is a little overconfident, unfortunately. We know basically nothing about Potnia besides her name (which means something like "mistress") -- we have no images, no definite sites of her worship, no epithets... UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:48, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would move note "b" after the comma following the text "centre near Pilos" in the same sentence.
  • ... "servants of the god"... Why not singular?
  • Only 5% of the land... Why not plural?
  • Most of the landholders there, including Eritha, are described with titles associated with religious cult, particularly forty-six people labelled as "servants of the god". ... Eritha is one of two women named as religious figures, along with another named Karpathia. ... Another woman at Sphagianes, by the name of Huamia, is listed on the tablet PY Ep 704 as a "servant of the god" Contradiction?
    • I wasn't counting "servants of the god" as religious figures -- they seem to be servants/slaves owned by the god/religious institution. There's probably a clearer way to phrase "religious figures" to mean "people like priests". Will think on it: any suggestions? UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:48, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I've had a go with "holding religious office". UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:40, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Why does not note "e" follow the citation (in contrast with all other notes)?
  • I would state that the meaning of the term "etōnion" is uncertain in the section when it is first mentioned.
  • ...happened late in the LH IIIB period, around the transition to LH IIIC, and... I would delete. Alternatively, explain the periods.
    • I ended up going for a footnote here. It's complicated, but we need to use the pottery dates, because that's the area of certainty: the absolute date is a lot less secure (because all absolute dates are dubious in the Aegean Bronze Age). UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:24, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • ...an etōnion may have been required to pay no or fewer taxes to the damos... To the damos (the ordinary people)?
    • Not a great definition, unfortunately: we did discuss what the damos was in the previous two paragraphs, so I don't think a gloss is helpful ("a body that probably represented or oversaw, somehow, at least some of the [other?] landholders"?) or particularly necessary.
Nakassis's point is that the tax Eritha owed (or didn't owe) might have been to the damos (so that damos are unhappy because they're getting less income); others think the obligation was to the palace, and possibly that the damos had to pay the difference if some of Eritha's land was tax exempt (so the damos are complaining either that Eritha is getting a free ride, or that they have to pay more tax because of her).UndercoverClassicist T·C 09:40, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • ...competing loci of religious, civic and royal power... I would avoid the use of the term "loci". Borsoka (talk) 04:01, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • (lead) ..., near the palatial centre of Pylos I would delete.
  • I would shorten the lead's second paragraph quite radically. Borsoka (talk) 09:37, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • Here I appreciate that we all have different approaches, and my way of writing an article is likely to be different from what many wise, skilled and capable people would have done. However, I'm not sure I see the advantage here. The lead is currently (by a rough count on Word) 257 of the article's 2455 words (which doesn't count references, notes and biblio), which at ~10% seems well in line for lead length; MOS:LEADLENGTH has Few well-written leads will be shorter than about 100 words. The leads in most featured articles contain about 250 to 400 words. The paragraph in question is 69 words and summarises just about all the biographical information we have for Eritha other than her legal dispute; it condenses the "Position in society" section, which is 676 words, so again the rough 10:1 ratio is holding steady. I can't really see that anything in there is trivial or irrelevant for a reader who won't read the body -- but, as ever, happy to discuss. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:04, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Borsoka: I think that's all replied to, though I'm afraid I've quibbled a couple. Open to discussion on those, particularly if I've misunderstood your point. UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:24, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FM

  • Some preliminary comments, will review fully later. FunkMonk (talk) 22:42, 21 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Why are some of the footnotes sourced with for example " See Judson 2020, pp. 12–20." instead of just regular citations?
    • In that case, it's because those pages of Judson are explaining this phenomenon in detail: you don't need all of them to get the basic point. I suppose the distinction is pretty minor; it could be a SFN? Ditto the Shelmerdine one on note g: Shelmerdine doesn't spend all these pages saying "the Aegean chronology is really complicated", but rather going into the ways in which it's complicated. UndercoverClassicist T·C 05:42, 22 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Doesn't the end of footnote f need a citation?
  • "The remains of the palace at Pylos" write the name instead of a general term with an WP:easter egg link?
    • I've tried to avoid it throughout, as the conventional name is the romantic "Palace of Nestor" -- but nobody called "Nestor" actually lived there, or, in all probability, ever existed. The name is modern rather than ancient -- it was Carl Blegen who came up with it in the 1930s. Calling it "the palace [at Pylos]" is unambiguous (there's only one) and, I think, a better option. UndercoverClassicist T·C 05:42, 22 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Could the entire "the palace at Pylos" part be the pipelink then, as it seems more specific than just "the palace"? FunkMonk (talk) 14:14, 23 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough: I've done that. We don't yet have a generic article for Mycenaean palace, but I've redlinked that, as we really should. UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:01, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Could also be done in the image caption. FunkMonk (talk) 17:14, 25 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Now done. UndercoverClassicist T·C 20:06, 25 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Present Dimitri Nakassis and other modern scholars by occupation for context?
    • Here I follow a wise FAC regular, and avoid giving occupational descriptions that amount to "this person is exactly the sort of expert you'd expect me to be citing". Disciplinary boundaries are fluid in Aegean prehistory -- most people here could equally be called archaeologist/prehistorian/philologist/Mycenologist/classicist at the very least, and it would be artificial and misleading to choose (for instance) whether to call Nakassis a linguist, a philologist, or an archaeologist. On the other hand, if someone's context is unusual or particularly important, it gets included. The same approach has been used at other FAs, such as Homeric Hymns and Brothers Poem.
  • is Karpathia worth a link?
    • I don't think so: we know nothing about her beyond her name, where she lived, and a tiny modicum of information about her property. We can only write an article about Eritha because so much ink has been spilled over her legal dispute. UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:11, 23 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Eritha and Karpathia control the largest amount" Controlled?
    • I'm not sure about this one, honestly, as we're talking about people within a text, but I've gone for the past tense in the interests of taking the least pretentious option.
  • "argue that the presence of the dispute in the palatial archive indicates that "land tenure was ultimately under the control of the king's central authority"" this is the first time you mention a king, way down in the last section, and throughout I was wondering what kind of authority was actually ruling the palace. Could this somehow be established earlier, for example at "Mycenaean states, such as Pylos in the southwestern Peloponnese, were centred around monumental buildings, known in modern scholarship as palaces"? And do we even know who the king was at the time? For context.
    • Ah -- this one's complicated, and I must admit that I don't agree with Shelmerdine and Bennet that it's wise to talk about a "king" at Pylos (there's someone who goes by a title that means that in later Greek, and seems to be extremely important, but the exact contours of their authority and legitimacy are incredibly murky). I've added something a bit further up, when we talk about the nature of the Pylian state. As it happens, we probably do know the name of the individual in question, but at this point we've got such a daisy-chain of inferences and assumptions that I'd rather leave that whole thing aside for now -- any reading of S+B puts this as institutional authority rather than anything to do with the specific person who held the title (though again I'm really not convinced that this is a sensible distinction to draw!). UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:19, 25 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Comments Support from Tim riley

Not much from me.

  • "were centred around monumental buildings" – there are those, of whom I am not one, who get frightfully exercised about "centre around" and insist it must be "centred on". I think they are rather silly (though logical) but I draw this view to your attention.
  • "around 2% of the estimated population" – I think the MoS prescription may have changed since I last tracked it down, but I think "two per cent" is much easier on the eye in the middle of prose. (The other version is fine in diagrams etc of course.)
  • "Guy Middleton has argued" – the image of the actor Guy Middleton, superb portrayer of cads and bounders, came instantly to mind when I read this. Better to introduce your Guy Middleton with a brief job label, I think.
    • See above one this one, though I acknowledge that there's arguments either way -- in this particular context, there are major cons to introducing Aegeanists by discipline (specifically, that they're all people of many hats, so narrowing it down to one is editorial at best and misleading at worst). I hope that few readers will assume that I've quoted an actor as an archaeological expert; the system employed here would give his trade as "the actor Guy Middleton" if we were calling on his opinion as someone outside the field. UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:57, 28 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • "indeed, this is one of few positions of power" – is the "indeed" a touch editorial?
  • "Only 5% of the land" – as above for the percentage.
  • "a legal dispute from Europe" – not sure about the preposition. Might not "in" be more accurate?
  • "the damos, whom he considers to have been "ordinary people" – unless "damos" is plural as well as singular (my Linear B is a bit rusty) we have a singular-v-plural clash here.
    • It's a collective noun: "the orchestra were all talented musicians"; "the Cabinet are unable to agree on anything". I think this is fine, but we could always do "which he considers to have been composed of...", which is only slightly more wordy. UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:57, 28 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • "and at least partially independent of it" – a minor matter, but I prefer to keep "partially" to indicate bias, and use just "partly" when that suffices in such a context as this.
  • "Hittite codes and complilations of law" – not sure if this should be compilations or complications but it ain't right as it is.

That's all from me. Tim riley talk 14:13, 27 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Happy to support the promotion of this article. It strikes me as meeting all the FA criteria, and turns what could have been a rather dry subject into a lively and engaging piece. Widely sourced, with no one source being cited more than nine times. I think the map is superb, and the other illustrations are fine. I look forward to seeing the article on our front page. Tim riley talk 10:28, 28 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Drive-by comment

1995. I am more used to seeing WP:CITEHOW at FAC. Possibly because the name of a publisher is an uncertain indication of their location - as with Bennet, 2013. But that is only a guideline, so fair enough. Gog the Mild (talk) 22:49, 29 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]


The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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