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Linear B text from Knossos
Linear B text from Knossos (Herakleion Museum cat. #87; photo: Athena Review)
Used at Knossos. Malia, and Khania in Late Minoan times when Crete was occupied by Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland (1600-1450 BC), Linear B evolved directly from the Minoan Linear A, whose characters the Mycenaeans then adapted to their own language.
Linear
B is best represented at various sites on mainland Greece including Mycenae and
Pylos, which have yielded archives of thousands of tablets. Linear B
was successfully deciphered in the 1950s by Michael Ventris (Chadwick
1958; 1989), who recognized it as a syllabic writing system used for an
early form of Greek spoken by Mycenaeans.
Like Linear A, Linear
B served bureaucratic or record-keeping purposes, as in palace
inventories, censuses, or taxation accounts. Unlike Linear A, Linear B
used horizontal lines or registers to separate each entry. The
transliteration of certain examples of Linear A indicates that their
contents did not differ drastically from Linear B. The entries were
usually made in a list-like format and prefaced with numbers tabulating
the records. Both types of tablets cited elements of daily life, such
as livestock (sheep, pigs, goats, cows), religious rituals or
ceremonies associated with palace life, food and drink (such as wine
used in celebrations), the harvesting of wheat and barley, weaponry,
and tabulations of men and women who had contributed significantly to
palace life or military exploits. Also revealed are Late Minoan site
names, including ko-no-so (Knossos) and a-mi-mi-so (Amnissos).
While
Linear B can be accurately read as an archaic Greek dialect, it remains
unknown which language(s) either Linear A or Minoan hieroglyphics
represented. Eventually, their successful decoding may shed invaluable
historical insights on the specific details of Minoan daily life,
including trade, farming, administrative practices, ritual, and perhaps
names of individuals, rulers, and datable events.
.[Source: "Bronze Age Writing on Crete: Hieroglyphs, Linear A, and Linear B," in Athena Review, Vol.3, no.3, 2003]
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