Linear B
Type	Syllabary with additional ideograms
Languages	Mycenaean Greek
Time period	Late Bronze Age
Status	Extinct
Parent systems	Linear A Linear B
Sister systems	Cypro-Minoan syllabary
ISO 15924	Linb, 401
Direction	Left-to-right
Unicode alias	Linear B
Unicode range	U+10000–U+1007F syllabic signs U+10080–U+100FF ideograms
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols.

History of the Greek language (see also: Greek alphabet)

Proto-Greek (c. 3000–1600 BC)

Mycenaean (c. 1600–1100 BC)

Ancient Greek (c. 800–330 BC) Dialects: Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, Attic-Ionic, Doric, Locrian, Pamphylian, Homeric Greek, Macedonian

Koine Greek (c. 330 BC–330)

Medieval Greek (330–1453)

Modern Greek (from 1453) Dialects: Calabrian, Cappadocian, Cheimarriotika, Cretan, Cypriot, Demotic, Griko, Katharevousa, Pontic, Tsakonian, Maniot, Yevanic This box: view talk edit *Dates (beginning with Ancient Greek) from Wallace, D. B. (1996). Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. p. 12. ISBN 0310218950.

Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. The script pre-dated the Greek alphabet by several centuries. A recent finding of the oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1450 BC.^[1] Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Cydonia,^[2] Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae,^[3] disappeared with the fall of Mycenaean civilization. The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages, provides no evidence of the use of writing.

The script appears related to Linear A, an undeciphered earlier script used for writing the Minoan language, and the later Cypriot syllabary, which recorded Greek. Linear B consists of around 87 syllabic signs and a large repertory of ideographic signs. These ideograms or "signifying" signs stand for objects or commodities, but do not have phonetic value and are never used as word signs in writing a sentence.

The application of Linear B seems to have been confined to administrative contexts. In all the thousands of clay tablets, a relatively small number of different "hands" have been detected: 45 in Pylos (west coast of the Peloponnese, in southern Greece) and 66 in Knossos (Crete).^[4] From this fact it could be thought that the script was used only by a guild of professional scribes who served the central palaces. Once the palaces were destroyed, the script disappeared.

The script[link]

Linear B has roughly 200 signs, divided into syllabic signs with phonetic values and ideograms with semantic values. The representations and naming of these signs has been standardized by a series of international colloquia starting with the first in Paris in 1956. After the third meeting in 1961 at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin, a standard proposed primarily by Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. (1918-2011), became known as the Wingspread Convention, which was adopted by a new organization, the Comité International Permanent des Études Mycéniennes (CIPEM), affiliated in 1970 by the fifth colloquium with UNESCO. Colloquia continue: the 13th occurred in 2010 in Paris.^[5]

Many of the signs are identical or similar to Linear A signs; however, Linear A, which encoded the unknown Minoan language, remains undeciphered and we cannot be sure that similar signs had similar phonetic values.^[6]

Syllabic signs[link]

The grid developed during decipherment by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick of phonetic values for syllabic signs is shown below.^[7]

Read the initial consonant in the left-most column and the vowel from the top row beneath the title. The transcription of the syllable (it may not have been pronounced that way) is listed next to the sign along with Bennett's identifying number for the sign preceded by an asterisk (as was Ventris' and Chadwick's convention).^{[note 1]} In cases where the transcription of the sign remains in doubt, Bennett's number serves to identify the sign.^[8] The signs on the tablets and other ancient artifacts often show considerable variation from each other and from the representations below. Discovery of the reasons for the variation and possible semantic differences is a topic of ongoing debate in Mycenaean studies.

Recognised signs of shape V, CV[note 2]
	-a		-e		-i		-o		-u
	𐀀	a *08	𐀁	e *38	𐀂	i *28	𐀃	o *61	𐀄	u *10
d-	𐀅	da *01	𐀆	de *45	𐀇	di *07	𐀈	do *14	𐀉	du *51
j-	𐀊	ja *57	𐀋	je *46			𐀍	jo *36
k-	𐀏	ka *77	𐀐	ke *44	𐀑	ki *67	𐀒	ko *70	𐀓	ku *81
m-	𐀔	ma *80	𐀕	me *13	𐀖	mi *73	𐀗	mo *15	𐀘	mu *23
n-	𐀙	na *06	𐀚	ne *24	𐀛	ni *30	𐀜	no *52	𐀝	nu *55
p-	𐀞	pa *03	𐀟	pe *72	𐀠	pi *39	𐀡	po *11	𐀢	pu *50
q-	𐀣	qa *16	𐀤	qe *78	𐀥	qi *21	𐀦	qo *32
r-	𐀨	ra *60	𐀩	re *27	𐀪	ri *53	𐀫	ro *02	𐀬	ru *26
s-	𐀭	sa *31	𐀮	se *09	𐀯	si *41	𐀰	so *12	𐀱	su *58
t-	𐀲	ta *59	𐀳	te *04	𐀴	ti *37	𐀵	to *05	𐀶	tu *69
w-	𐀷	wa *54	𐀸	we *75	𐀹	wi *40	𐀺	wo *42
z-	𐀼	za *17	𐀽	ze *74			𐀿	zo *20

Special and unknown signs[link]

In addition to the grid, the first edition of Documents contained a number of other signs termed "homophones" because they appeared at that time to resemble the sounds of other syllables and were transcribed accordingly: pa₂ and pa₃ were presumed homophonous to pa. Many of these were identified by the second edition and are shown in the "special values" below.^[9] The second edition relates: "It may be taken as axiomatic that there are no true homophones." The unconfirmed identifications of *34 and *35 as ai₂ and ai₃ were removed. pa₂ became qa.^[10]

Special values
Character	𐁀	𐁁	𐁂	𐁃	𐁄	𐁅	𐁇	𐁆	𐁈	𐁉	𐁊	𐁋	𐁌	𐁍
Transcription	a2 (ha)	a3 (ai)	au	dwe	dwo	nwa	pte	pu2 (phu)	ra2 (rya)	ra3 (rai)	ro2 (ryo)	ta2 (tya)	twe	two
Bennett's Number	*25	*43	*85	*71	*90	*48	*62	*29	*76	*33	*68	*66	*87	*91

Other values remain unknown, mainly because of scarcity of evidence concerning them.^{[9][note 3]} Note that *34 and *35 are mirror images of each other but whether this graphic relationship indicates a phonetic one remains unconfirmed.

Untranscribed and doubtful values
Character	𐁐	𐁑	𐁒	𐁓		𐁔	𐁕	𐁖	𐁗	𐁘	𐀎	𐁙	𐁚	𐁛	𐁜	𐁝
Transcription	*18	*19	*22	*34	*35	*47	*49	pa3?	*63	swi?	ju?	zu?	swa?	*83	*86	*89
Bennett's Number	*18	*19	*22	*34	*35	*47	*49	*56	*63	*64	*65	*79	*82	*83	*86	*89

In recent times, CIPEM inherited the former authority of Bennett and the Wingspread Convention in deciding what signs are "confirmed" and how to officially represent the various sign categories. In editions of Mycenaean texts, those signs whose value has not been confirmed by CIPEM are always transcribed as numbers preceded by an asterisk (e.g., *64). CIPEM also allocates the numerical identifiers, and until such allocation, new signs (or obscured or mutilated signs) are transcribed as a bullet-point enclosed in square brackets: [•].

Spelling and pronunciation[link]

The signs are approximations―each may be used to represent a variety of about 70 distinct combinations of sounds, within rules and conventions. The grid presents a system of monosyllabic signs of the type V/CV. Clarification of the 14 or so special values tested the limits of the grid model, but Chadwick in the end concluded that even with the ramifications the syllabic signs can unexceptionally be considered monosyllabic.^[11]

Possible exceptions, Chadwick goes on to explain, include the two diphthongs, 𐁁 (ai) and 𐁂 (au), as in Ai-ku-pi-ti-jo for Aiguptios (Αἰγύπτιος) and Au-ke-wa for Augewās (Αὐγείας).^{[note 4]} However a diphthong is by definition two vowels united into a single sound and therefore might be typed as just V. Thus 𐁉 (rai), as in e-rai-wo for elaiwon (ἔλαιον),^{[note 5]} is of the type CV. Diphthongs are otherwise treated as two monosyllables: a-ro-u-ra for 'arourans' (accusative plural of ἄρουραι), of the types CV and V.^[12] Lengths of vowels and accents are not marked.

𐁌 (Twe), 𐁍 (two), 𐁃 (dwe), 𐁄 (dwo), 𐁅 (nwa) and the more doubtful 𐁘 (swi) and 𐁚 (swa) may be regarded as beginning with labialized consonants, rather than two consonants, even though they may alternate with a two-sign form: O-da-twe-ta and O-da-tu-we-ta for Odatwenta; A-si-wi-jo and A-swi-jo for Aswios (Ἄσιος). Similarly, 𐁈 (rya), 𐁊 (ryo) and 𐁋 (tya) begin with palatalized consonants rather than two consonants: -ti-ri-ja or -ti-rya for -trya (-τρια).

The one sign Chadwick tags as the exception to the monosyllabic rule is 𐁇 (pte), but this he attributes to a development pte<*pje as in kleptei<*klep-yei.

Linear B does not consistently distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops (except in the dental series) and between aspirated and unaspirated stops even when these distinctions are phonemic in Mycenaean Greek. For example,^[13] pa-te is patēr (πατήρ), pa-si is phāsi (φησί.^{[note 6]} p on the other hand never represents β: βασιλεύς is qa-si-re-u^{[note 7]}); ko-ru is korus (κόρυς), ka-ra-we is grāwes (plural of γρηύς), ko-no is skhoinos. Exceptionally, however, the dentals are represented by a t-series and a d-series for unvoiced and voiced: to-so for tosos (τόσος or τόσσος) but do-ra for dōra (plural of δῶρον); however, to-ra-ke for thōrākes (plural of θώραξ). In other cases aspiration can be marked but is optional: pu-te for phutēr ("planter", from φυτεύω), but phu-te-re for phutēres ("planters" ). Initial aspiration may be marked only in the case of initial a and rarely: ha-te-ro for hateron (masculine ἅτερος),^[14] and yet a-ni-ja for hāniai (ἁνίαι).

The j-series represents the semivowel equivalent to English "y", and is used word-initially and as an intervocalic glide after a syllable ending in i: -a-jo for -αῖος (-aios); a-te-mi-ti-jo for Ἀρτεμίτιος (Artemitios). The w-series similarly are semivowels used word-initially and intervocalically after a syllable ending in u: ku-wa-no for kuanos (κύανος).^[15]

The r-series includes both the /r/ and /l/ phonemes: ti-ri-po for tripos (τρίπος) and tu-ri-so for Tulisos (Τυλισός).

The q-series is used for monosyllables beginning with a class of consonants that disappeared from classical Greek by regular phonetic change: the labiovelars (see under Mycenaean Greek). These had entered the language from various sources: inheritance from Proto-Indo-European, assimilation, borrowing of foreign words, especially names. In Mycenaean they are /kʷ/, /gʷ/, and rarely /kʷh/ in names and a few words:^[16] a-pi-qo-ro for amphiq^uoloi (ἀμφίπολοι); qo-u-ko-ro for g^uoukoloi (βουκόλοι); -qo-i-ta for -φόντης.

Some consonants in some contexts are not written (but are understood): word-initial s- and -w before a consonant, as in pe-ma for sperma (σπέρμα); syllable-final -l, -m, -n, -r, -s: a-to-ro-qo for anthrōq^uos (ἄνθρωπος). In the first example, the pe-, which was primarily used as its value pe of grid class CV, is being used for sper-, not in that class. This was not an innovative or exceptional use, but followed the stated rules. Similarly, a, being primarily of grid class V, is being used as an- and could be used for al, am, ar, and so on.

Clusters of two or three consonants that do not follow the initial s- and w- rule or the double consonants: ξ (ks or x), ψ (ps) and q^us (which later did not exist in classical Greek) were represented by the same number of signs of type CV as the cluster had consonants: ko-no-so for Knōsos,^{[note 8]} ku-ru-so for khrusos (χρυσός). The consonants were the same as in the cluster. The vowels so introduced have been called "empty", "null", "extra", "dead" and other terms by various writers as they represent no sound. The sign was not alphabetic: rules governed the selection of the vowel and therefore of the sign. The vowel had to be the same as the one of the first syllable following the cluster or if at the end of the word, preceding: ti-ri-po with ti- (instead of ta-, te- and so on) to match -ri-.

Ideograms[link]

Linear B also uses a large number of ideograms. They express:

• The type of object concerned (e.g. a cow, wool, a spear)
• A unit of measure.

They are typically at the end of a line before a number and appear to signify the object the number applies to. Many of the values remain unknown or disputed. Some commodities such as cloth and containers are divided into many different categories represented by distinct ideograms. Livestock may be marked with respect to their sex.

The numerical references for the ideograms were originally devised by Ventris and Bennett, divided into functional groups corresponding to the breakdown of Bennett's index. These groups are numbered beginning 100, 110, 120 etc., with some provision of spare numbers for future additions; the official CIPEM numberings used today are based on Ventris and Bennett's numbering, with the provision that three or four letter codes (written in small capitals), based on Latin words that seemed relevant at the time, are used where the meanings are known and agreed. Unicode (as of version 5.0) encodes 123 Linear B ideograms.

The ideograms are symbols, not pictures of the objects in question - e.g. one tablet records a tripod with missing legs, but the ideogram used is of a tripod with three legs. In modern transcriptions of Linear B tablets it is typically convenient to represent an ideogram by its Latin or English name or by an abbreviation of the Latin name. Ventris and Chadwick generally used English; Bennett, Latin. Neither the English nor the Latin can be relied upon as an accurate name of the object; in fact, the identification of some of the more obscure objects is a matter of exegesis.^[17]

Ideograms

Glyph	Codepoint[note 9]	Bennett[18]	CIPEM[19]	English[20]
People and Animals
	U+10080	100[21] A-	VIR vir	MAN
	U+10081	102 A-	MUL mulier	WOMAN
	U+10082	104 Cn	CERV cervus	DEER
𐂃	U+10083	105 Ca S-	EQU equus	HORSE
𐂄	U+10084	105 Ca	EQUf	mare[22]
𐂅	U+10085	105 Ca	EQUm	stallion
𐀥	U+10025	106 QI *21	OVIS ovis	SHEEP
𐀥		WE *75	we-ka-ta Bous ergatēs	"Adjunct to ox" (1973)[23]
𐂆	U+10086	106b C- D-	OVISf	EWE
𐂇	U+10087	106a C- D-	OVISm	RAM
𐁒	U+10052	107 RA *22	CAP capra	GOAT
𐂈	U+10088	107b C- Mc	CAPf	SHE-GOAT
𐂉	U+10089	107a C-	CAPm	HE-GOAT
𐁂	U+10042	108 AU *85 C-	SUS sūs	PIG
𐂊	U+1008A	108b C-	SUSf	SOW
𐂋	U+1008B	108a C-	SUSm	BOAR
𐀘	U+10018	109 MU *23 C-	BOS bōs	OX
𐂌	U+1008C	109b C-	BOSf	COW
𐂍	U+1008D	109a C-	BOSm	OX/BULL
Units of Measurement
		110	Z kotylai	Volume Cup[24]
		111	V khoinikes	Volume
		112	T	Dry
		113	S	Liquid
		114		Weight
		*21		Weight
		*2		Weight
		115	P	Weight
		116	N	Weight
		117	M dimnaion[25]	Weight
		118	L talanton	TALENT
		*72 G-		Bunch?
		*74 S-		Pair
		*15 S-		Single
		*61		Deficit
By Dry Measure
𐂎	U+1008E	120 E- F-	GRA grānum	WHEAT
𐂏	U+1008F	121 F-	HORD hordeum	BARLEY
𐂐	U+10090	122 F- U-	OLIV olīva	OLIVES
𐀛	U+1001B	NI *30 F	FICUS	FIGS
𐀎	U+1000E	*65	FARINA	FLOUR "some kind of grain"[26]
𐂑	U+10091	123 G- Un	AROM arōma	CONDIMENT
		KO *70 G-		Coriander
𐀭	U+1002D	SA *31 G-		Sesame
		KU *81 G-		Cumin
		SE *9 G-		Celery
		MA *80 G-		Fennel
		124 G-	PYC	cyperus
𐂒	U+10092	125 F-	CYP	cyperus?
		126 F-	CYP+KU	cyperus+ku
𐂓	U+10093	127 Un	KAPO	fruit?
𐂔	U+10094	128 G-	KANAKO	safflower
By liquid measure
By weight
By weight or in units
Counted in units
Vessels[27]
𐃟	U+100DF	200	sartāgo	BOILING PAN
𐃠	U+100E0	201	TRI tripūs	TRIPOD CAULDRON
𐃡	U+100E1	202	pōculum	GOBLET?
𐃢	U+100E2	203	urceus	WINE JAR?
𐃣	U+100E3	204 Ta	hirnea	EWER
𐃤	U+100E4	205 K Tn	hirnula	JUG
𐃥	U+100E5	206	HYD hydria	HYDRIA
𐃦	U+100E6	207		TRIPOD AMPHORA
𐃧	U+100E7	208	PAT patera	BOWL
𐃨	U+100E8	209	AMPH amphora	AMPHORA
𐃩	U+100E9	210		STIRRIP JAR
𐃪	U+100EA	211		WATER BOWL?
𐃫	U+100EB	212	SIT situla	WATER JAR?
𐃬	U+100EC	213	LANX lanx	COOKING BOWL
Furniture
𐃄	U+100C4	220 Ta	scamnum	FOOTSTOOL
𐃅	U+100C5	225	ALV alveus
Weapons
𐃆	U+100C6	230 R	HAS hasta	SPEAR
𐃇	U+100C7	231 R	SAG sagitta	ARROW
𐃈	U+100C8	232 Ta	*232	?
𐃉	U+100C9	233 Ra		DAGGER
𐃊	U+100CA	234	GLA gladius	SWORD
Chariots
𐃌	U+100CC	240 Sc	BIG biga	WHEELED CHARIOT
𐃍	U+100CD	241 Sd Se	CUR currus	WHEEL-LESS CHARIOT
𐃎	U+100CE	242 Sf Sg	CAPS capsus	CHARIOT FRAME
𐃏	U+100CF	243 Sa So	ROTA rota	WHEEL

Archives[link]

Corpus[link]

The tablets are classified by the location of their excavation.

Another 170 inscriptions in Linear B have been found on various vessels.

If it is genuine, the Kafkania pebble, dated to the 17th century BC, would be the oldest known Mycenean inscription, and hence the earliest preserved testimony of the Greek language. Besides that, an inscribed clay tablet was found in Iklaina dating to between 1450 and 1350 B.C.^[28]

Chronology[link]

Timeline of Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean scripts[link]

The sequence and the geographical spread of Cretan hieroglyphs, Linear A and Linear B, the three overlapping, but distinct, writing systems on Bronze Age Crete, the Aegean islands, and the Greek mainland are summarized as follows:^[29]

Timeline of Linear B[link]

The main archives for Linear B are associated with these stages of Late Minoan and Helladic pottery:^[30]

Controversy on the date of the Knossos tablets[link]

The Knossos archive was dated by Arthur Evans to the destruction by conflagration of about 1400 BC, which would have baked and preserved the clay tablets. He dated this event to the LM II period. This view stood until Carl Blegen excavated the site of ancient Pylos in 1939 and uncovered tablets inscribed in Linear B. They were fired in the conflagration that destroyed Pylos about 1200 BC, at the end of LHIIIB. With the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris in 1952, serious questions about Evans' date began to be considered. Most notably, Blegen said that the inscribed stirrup jars, which are oil flasks with stirrup-shaped handles, imported from Crete around 1200 were of the same type as those dated by Evans to the destruction of 1400. Blegen found a number of similarities between 1200 BC Pylos and 1400 BC Knossos and suggested the Knossian evidence be reexamined, as he was sure of the 1200 Pylian date.

The examination uncovered a number of difficulties. The Knossos tablets had been found at various locations in the palace. Evans had not kept exact records. Recourse was had to the day books of Evans' assistant, Duncan Mackenzie, who had conducted the day-to-day excavations. There were discrepancies between the notes in the day books and Evans' excavation reports. Moreover, the two men had disagreed over the location and strata of the tablets. The results of the reinvestigation were eventually published by Palmer and Boardman, On the Knossos Tablets.^[31] It contains two works, Leonard Palmer's The Find-Places of the Knossos Tablets and John Boardman's The Date of the Knossos Tablets, representing Blegen's and Evans' views respectively. Consequently, the dispute was known for a time as "the Palmer-Boardman dispute". There has been no generally accepted answer to it yet.

Contents[link]

The major cities and palaces used Linear B for records of disbursements of goods. Wool, sheep, and grain were some common items, often given to groups of religious people and to groups of "men watching the coastline."

The tablets were kept in groups in baskets on shelves, judging by impressions left in the clay from the weaving of the baskets. When the buildings they were housed in were destroyed by fires, many of the tablets were fired.

Discovery and decipherment[link]

Linear B tablet discovered by Arthur Evans

Tablets

Arthur J. Evans' classification of scripts[link]

The British archaeologist, Arthur Evans, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, was presented by Greville Chester in 1886 with a sealstone from Crete engraved with a writing he took to be Mycenaean.^[32] Heinrich Schliemann had encountered signs similar to these, but had never identified the signs clearly as writing, relating in his major work on Mycenae that "of combinations of signs resembling inscriptions I have hitherto only found three or four ...."^[33] In 1893 Evans purchased more sealstones while shopping in Athens. He verified from the antiquarian dealers that the stones came from Crete. During the next year he noticed the script on other artifacts in the Ashmolean. In 1894, he embarked for Crete in search of the script. Almost immediately on arrival he jumped into a trench at Knossos and saw the sign of the double axe on a palace wall. He knew he had found the source of the script. Subsequently he found more stones being worn by Cretan women as amulets. They were called γαλόπετρες (galopetres, "milk-stones") and had come from the various ruins.

Starting in 1894, Evans published his theories that the signs evidenced various phases in the development of a writing system in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, the first article being "Primitive Pictographs and a Prae-Phoenician Script from Crete".^[34] In these articles Evans distinguished between "pictographic writing" and "a linear system of writing." He did not explicitly define these terms, causing some confusion among subsequent writers concerning what he meant, but in 1898 he wrote^[35] "These linear forms indeed consist of simple geometrical figures which unlike the more complicated pictorial class were little susceptible to modification," and "That the linear or quasi-alphabetic signs ... were in the main ultimately derived from the rudely scratched line pictures belonging to the infancy of art can hardly be doubted."

Meanwhile Evans began to negotiate for the purchase of Knossos. He established a special fund, the Cretan Exploration Fund, containing only his own money at first. By 1896 the fund had purchased 1/4 of Kephala Hill, on which the ruins were located, with first option to buy the rest. However, he could not obtain a firman, or permission to excavate, from the Ottoman government. He returned to Britain. In January, 1897, the Christian population of Crete staged its final insurrection against the Ottoman Empire. The last Ottoman troops were ferried off the island by the British fleet on December 5, 1898.^[36] In that year also Evans and his friends returned to finish paying for the site. By this time the Fund had other contributors as well.^[37] In 1899 the Constitution of a new Cretan Republic went into effect. Arthur received permission to excavate from the local authorities. Excavation on the hill began on March 23, 1900.

According to Evans' report to the British School at Athens for that year,^[38] on April 5 the excavators discovered the first large cache ever of Linear B tablets among the remains of a wooden box in a disused terracotta bathtub. Subsequently caches turned up at multiple locations, including the Room of the Chariot Tablets, where over 350 pieces from four boxes were found. The tablets were 4.5 cm (1.8 in) to 19.5 cm (7.7 in) long by 1.2 cm (0.47 in) to 7.2 cm (2.8 in) wide and were scored with horizontal lines over which text was written in about 70 characters. Even in this earliest excavation report Evans could tell that "...a certain number of quasi-pictorial characters also occur which seem to have an ideographic or determinative meaning."^[38]

The excavation was over for that year by June 2. Evans reported: "only a comparatively small proportion of the tablets were preserved in their entirety,"^[38] the causes of destruction being rainfall through the roof of the storage room, crumbling of small pieces, and being thrown away by workmen who failed to identify them. A report on September 6 to the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland^[39] began to use some of the concepts characteristic of Evans' later thought: "palace of Knossos" and "palace of Minos." Appleton's for that year, 1900,^[40] notes that Evans took up Stillman's theme that the palace was the labyrinth of mythology in which the half-bovine son of King Minos lurked. In the report, the tablets are now called a "linear script" as opposed to the "hieroglyphic or conventionalized pictographic script." The linear script has characters that are "of a free, upright, European character" and "seem to have been for the most part syllabic." Evans reasserts the ideographic idea: "a certain number are unquestionably ideographic or determinative."

The years after 1900 were consumed by excavations at Knossos and the discovery and study by Evans of tablets there and elsewhere but nothing substantially new occurred. Evans planned a comprehensive work on Cretan scripts to be called Scripta Minoa. A year before the publication of volume I he began to drop hints that he now believed the linear script was two scripts, to be presented in the forthcoming book.

In Scripta Minoa I,^[41] which appeared in 1909, he explained that the discovery of the Phaistos Disk in July, 1908, had caused him to pull the book from the presses so that he could include the disk by permission as it had not yet been published. On the next page^[42] he mentioned that he was also including by permission of Frederico Halbherr of the Italian Mission in Crete unpublished tablets from Haghia Triada written in a linear script of "Class A." To what degree if any Halbherr was responsible for Evans' division of the "linear script" into "Class A" and "Class B" is not stated. The Knossos tablets were of Class B, so that Evans could only have perceived Class A in tablets from elsewhere, and so recently that he needed permission to include the examples.

Evans summarized the differences between the two scripts as "type" or "form of script;' that is, varieties in the formation and arrangement of the characters. For example, he says "the clay documents belonging to Class A show a certain approximation in their forms to those presenting the hieroglyphic inscriptions ... the system of numerals is also in some respects intermediate between that of the hieroglyphic documents and that of the linear Class B."^[43]

The first volume covered "the Hieroglyphic and Primitive Linear Classes" in three parts: the "pre-Phoenician Scripts of Crete", the "Pictorial Script" and "the Phaistos Disk." One or two more volumes publishing the Linear A and Linear B tablets were planned but Evans ran out of time; the project required more than one man could bring to it. For a good many of the years left to him he was deeply enmeshed in war and politics in the Balkans. When he did return to Knossos completion and publication of the palace excavations took priority. His greatest work, Palace of Minos, came out in 1935. It did include scattered descriptions of tablets. His life was finished in 1941, during additional turmoil in the eastern Mediterranean.

The Knossos tablets had remained in the museum at Irakleion, Crete, where many of them now were missing. The unpublished second volume consisted of notes by Evans and plates and fonts created by Clarendon Press. In 1939 Carl Blegen had uncovered the Pylos Tablets; pressure was mounting to finish Scripta Minoa II. After Evans' death, Alice Kober, assistant to John Myres and major transcriber of the Knossos tablets, prompted Myres to come back from retirement and finish the work. E.L. Bennett added more transcriptions. The second volume came out in 1952 with Evans cited as author and Myres as editor,^[44] just before the discovery that Linear B writes an early form of Greek. An impatient Ventris and Chadwick declared: "Two generations of scholars had been cheated of the opportunity to work constructively on the problem."^[45]

Alice Kober's triplets[link]

About the same time, Alice Kober studied Linear B and managed to construct grids, linking symbols that seemed to have a strong grammatical relationship. Kober noticed that a number of Linear B words had common roots and suffixes. This led her to believe that Linear B represented an inflected language, with nouns changing their endings depending on their case. However, some characters in the middle of the words seemed to correspond with neither a root nor a suffix. Because this effect was found in other, known languages, Kober surmised that the odd characters were bridging syllables, with the beginning of the syllable belonging to the root and the end belonging to the suffix. This was a reasonable assumption, since Linear B had far too many characters to be considered alphabetic and far too few characters to be logographic; therefore, each character should represent a syllable.

Using the knowledge that certain characters shared the same beginning or ending sounds, Kober built a table similar to the one above; her untimely death at age 43 in 1950 prevented her from possibly taking the final step or see others do it, namely to link the characters to actual phonetics.

Emmett L. Bennett's transcription conventions[link]

The convention for numbering the symbols still in use today was first devised by United States Professor Emmett L. Bennett, Jr.. Working alongside fellow academic Alice Kober, by 1950 Bennett had deciphered the metrical system, based on his intensive study of Linear B tablets unearthed at Pylos. He was also an early proponent of the idea that Linear A and B represented different languages. Bennett's book The Pylos Tablets became a crucial resource for Michael Ventris, who later described it as "a wonderful piece of work"^[46]

Michael Ventris' identification as Greek[link]

Michael Ventris and John Chadwick performed the bulk of their decipherment of Linear B between 1951 and 1953. At first, Ventris chose his own numbering system, and agreed with Evans' hypothesis that Linear B was not Greek; however he later switched back to Bennett's system.

Based on Kober's work, and after making some inspired assumptions, Ventris was able to deduce the pronunciation of the syllables. Some Linear B tablets had been discovered on the Greek mainland, and there was reason to believe that some of the chains of symbols he had encountered on the Cretan tablets were names. Noting that certain names appeared only in the Cretan texts, he made the inspired guess that those names applied to cities on the island. This proved to be correct. Armed with the symbols he could decipher from this, Ventris soon unlocked much text and determined that the underlying language of Linear B was in fact Greek, in direct contradiction to the general scientific views of the times, and to Ventris' own hunch that it would turn out to be Etruscan.

Ventris' discovery was of immense significance, because it demonstrated a Greek-speaking Minoan-Mycenaean culture on Crete, and presented Greek in writing some 600 years earlier than what was thought at the time.

Interestingly, in 1935, the British School at Athens was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition at Burlington House, London. Among the speakers was Sir Arthur Evans, then in his eighty-fourth year and the teenager Michael Ventris was present in the audience.^[47]

John Chadwick's expert contributions to reading the tablets[link]

Chadwick, an expert in historical Greek, helped Ventris decipher the text and discover the vocabulary and grammar of Mycenaean Greek.

Unicode[link]

Linear B was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2003 with the release of version 4.0.

The Linear B Syllabary block is U+10000 ... U+1007F. The Linear B Ideograms block is U+10080 ... U+100FF. The Unicode block for the related Aegean Numbers is U+10100 ... U+1013F.

See also[link]

• Aegean civilization
• Aegean numerals
• Linear A
• Linear C
• Mycenaean Greek
• Proto-Greek

Notes[link]

Sources[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Carpenter, Rhys, (1957) "Linear B", Phoenix, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer, 1957), pp. 47-62
• Chadwick, John (1958). The Decipherment of Linear B. Second edition (1990). Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-39830-4. http://books.google.com/books?id=TD8YAlh_XHwC&printsec=frontcover. 
• Chadwick, John (1976). The Mycenaean World. Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-29037-6. 
• Chadwick, John (1987). Linear B and Related Scripts; "Reading the Past". Third impression (1997). University of California Press/British Museum. ISBN 0-520-06019-9.  has the Enkomi clay tablet, circa 1500 BCE., examples of Linear B tablets, and translated, the basic Linear B syllabary, the Cypriot syllabary and discussions thereof, and short sections on Linear A, and the Phaistos Disk.
• Levin, Saul (1964). The Linear B Decipherment Controversy Re-examined. State University of New York Press. OCLC 288842. 
• Palaima, Thomas G., "Unlocking the Secrets of Ancient Writing: The Parallel Lives of Michael Ventris and Linda Schele and the Decipherment of Mycenaean and Mayan Writing", University of Texas at Austin, Eleventh International Mycenological Colloquium, 2000.
• Robinson, Andrew (1995). The Story of Writing. Paperback edition (1999). Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-28156-4.  Chapter 6, Linear B, pp 108–119: discusses Arthur Evans, his work, the Cypriot clues, the syllabary, Alice Kober, the "Grid", and a sample tablet transliterated, and translated into English.
• Singh, Simon (2000). The Code Book. Anchor. ISBN 0-385-49532-3.  for a general outline of the Linear B deciphering story, from Schliemman to Chadwick.
• Ventris, Michael (1988). Work notes on Minoan language research and other unedited papers. Edizioni dell'Ateneo 1988 Roma. 
• Ventris, Michael; Chadwick, John (1973). Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Second ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-08558-6. 
• Ventris, Michael; Chadwick, John (1953) "Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives", The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 73, (1953), pp. 84-103.

External links[link]

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