Linear B: the oldest Greek writing

Linear B is a script used in Bronze Age Crete and mainland Greece, roughly between 1400 and 1200 BC, to write the oldest known form of Greek, called Mycenaean. It is called “linear” because its signs are drawn with lines scratched into clay rather than as pictures; in Greek it is the Γραμμική Β, from γραμμή, “line”. The letter B separates it from the older Linear A of Minoan Crete, which is still undeciphered: nobody knows what language it records.

Almost all Linear B texts survive on clay tablets, πινακίδες. The largest archives come from Knossos on Crete, with some 4,100 tablets and fragments, and from the so-called Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Messenia, with about 1,050; smaller groups come from Mycenae, Tiryns, Thebes, Chania and a few other sites. The tablets were never meant to last. They were only dried, not fired, and served for current accounts. They survive because the fires that destroyed the palaces baked them hard, so virtually none is more than a year older than the destruction of its palace. Their content is administrative: sheep and wool, olive oil and perfumed oil, bronze for smiths, chariots, offerings to the gods.

The first Linear B tablet seen by a modern excavator probably came from the dig of the Greek businessman and antiquarian Minos Kalokairinos at Knossos in 1878; from 1900 Sir Arthur Evans's excavations there produced thousands more. Evans was sure the language was not Greek, and few scholars disagreed. Two facts were clear. With 87 phonetic signs the script had too many signs for an alphabet and too few for a system of word-signs, so it had to be a syllabary, one sign for each συλλαβή, syllable. Alongside these signs it used pictorial logograms for people, animals and goods, followed by numerals.

The American classicist Alice Kober proved that the language was inflected: groups of words differed only in their endings. Emmett L. Bennett Jr fixed the standard list of signs and in 1951 published the Pylos tablets, first found in 1939. The British architect Michael Ventris arranged the signs in a grid of shared consonants and vowels and then guessed that some Knossos words were Cretan place-names: a-mi-ni-so for Amnisos, the harbour of Knossos, and ko-no-so for Knossos itself. To his surprise the values gave Greek. He announced the decipherment on BBC radio on 1 July 1952. The philologist John Chadwick joined him, and their joint article appeared in 1953. That year a newly found Pylos tablet, PY Ta 641, confirmed it: beside the drawing of a tripod cauldron and the numeral 2 it reads ti-ri-po-de, τρίποδε, “two tripods”.

Linear B was adapted from the Minoan script, which was made for another language, and it fits Greek badly. Each sign stands for a pure vowel (a, e, i, o, u) or for a consonant followed by a vowel (pa, ti, ko). Greek words with consonant clusters and final consonants must be simplified, and the reader has to restore what is missing:

• Final consonants such as -s are usually not written: ko-no-so is Knossos.
• One set of signs serves for both l and r.
• One series covers k, g and kh: ka-ko stands for khalkos, χαλκός, “bronze”.
• Clusters are broken up with extra vowels: ti-ri-po-de for tripode.

Mycenaean Greek also keeps sounds and forms that later disappeared. The tablets still write the sound w, lost from most later dialects: e-ra-wo / e-ra3-wo is elaiwon, classical ἔλαιον, “olive oil”, and the king is the wa-na-ka, wanax, who appears in Homer as ἄναξ. A bronzesmith is a ka-ke-u, khalkeus, the classical χαλκεύς, and the tablets of the Jn series at Pylos list the amounts of bronze handed out to such smiths.

The decipherment pushed written Greek back more than 3,000 years, some five centuries before Homer, and made Greek the oldest recorded European language that is still spoken. It also changed the picture of the Mycenaean world. The tablets show palaces run by scribes who counted everything: produce owed to the palace, rations, livestock, land, offerings to Zeus and other gods. Such a bureaucracy fits poorly with the world of the Iliad, where wealth means cattle and treasure taken in raids.

Much remains uncertain. Because the tablets cover only the last months of each palace, they give a narrow snapshot. They contain no letters, laws or literature, and the meaning of many words is still debated. Historians disagree about how much territory each palace controlled, and the date of the destruction at Knossos has long been disputed. After the palaces fell, around 1200 BC, writing vanished from Greece for several centuries. When the Greeks wrote again, they used an alphabet adapted from the Phoenician script, not Linear B.