2002 Vienna Symposium
The results of a specialist symposium held in Vienna December 5–6, 2002 have been published. These papers further dismantle the "house of cards" constructed by the editors of the tablets concerning religious references in the Thebes tablets.
Günter Neumann (pp. 125–138) demonstrates clearly that the animals in the Thebes tablets are not in any way sacred or "divine", but are animals that would naturally be part of everyday life for Mycenaean and later Greeks. He gathers the explicit historical evidence for this, including references to these animals being fed grains.
Michael Meier-Brügger (pp. 111–118) clearly demonstrates that de-qo-no as "master of banqueting" is linguistically impossible. It must be deipnon "main dinner" as in Homer; that di-wi-ja-me-ro cannot equal "the part for the goddess Diwia" but has to be "two-day period" (as also argued earlier by Melena and in this volume by Killen); that si-to is not an otherwise unattested god Sito (Grain) but plain siton "grain".
José Luis Garcia Ramón (pp. 37–69) demonstrates that linguistically a-ko-ro-da-mo cannot signify agorodamos "mystic assembler of the people". He proposes the simple Greek man's name Akrodamos. He also sees that o-po-re-i is a personal name parallel to another in these Thebes texts me-to-re-i. They mean respectively "On the mountain" and "Beyond the mountain." So o-po-re-i does not mean "Zeus of the Fall Harvest", which is impossible according to Mycenaean usage for god's names and epithets.
John T. Killen (pp. 79–110) specifically concludes (p. 103): "...the fact that ma-ka, o-po-re-i, and ko-wa never all occur together, and that it requires a special hypothesis to explain this fact, combined with what I believe are the continuing difficulties with explaining o-po-re-i as a theonym /Opo:rehi/, make me reluctant for the present to accept the ma-ka = Ma:i Ga:i equation."
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