Scripts & Magical Alphabets

Linear B

Also Known As Mycenaean Greek Script The script of the Mycenaean palace archives.

Aegean Script Family

Origin c. 1450 to 1200 BCE, Mycenaean Greece

Linear B is the syllabic script used for the earliest recorded form of Greek in the Mycenaean palaces, deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952. Its tablets are administrative rather than literary, but their offering lists name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not invented later. The script fell out of use with the palaces around 1200 BCE, and Greek was not written again for roughly four centuries.

Facts

Origins

Origin Period

c. 1450 to 1200 BCE, Mycenaean Greece 1

Place of Origin

Bronze Age Greece, particularly Crete and the Mycenaean mainland. 1

Identity

Script Type

Syllabary 1

Script type (class)

Syllabary 1

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How the Script Was Read

The decipherment is a rare case where the working can be followed. The tablets were unreadable and the language unknown, and the first real progress came from an American scholar who noticed sets of words sharing a stem but differing in their final signs, which showed that the language inflected and allowed a grid to be built relating signs that shared a consonant or a vowel without knowing what either was.

Michael Ventris, an English architect who had worked on the problem since boyhood, extended that grid and then made the guess that broke it open. On the assumption that certain frequently occurring words were place names on Crete, he assigned values that produced recognisable names, and the values so obtained generated Greek words elsewhere. Ventris had long expected the language to be something other than Greek and followed the evidence against his own expectation. Confirmation came from an independent direction shortly afterwards, when a newly excavated tablet listing vessels was found to match the readings against the drawings of the objects beside them. A philologist joined the work and the two published the decipherment together. Ventris died in a road accident a few years later.

Gods Found in an Accounting Record

The tablets were never meant to survive. They are unfired clay records of palace administration, listing rations, livestock, textiles, personnel and offerings, kept for a single year and then discarded, and they exist only because the fires that destroyed the palaces baked them hard. The religious content is therefore incidental: it appears because temples and sanctuaries received allocations that had to be recorded. The names in those allocation lists changed the study of Greek religion.

Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, Artemis and Dionysus appear in Bronze Age records, some five centuries before the earliest Greek literature, which established that these gods were worshipped in the Mycenaean world rather than being later arrivals. Dionysus in particular had been widely treated as a foreign import of a later period, and the tablets made that untenable. They also record deities who did not survive, along with a title meaning the Lady used with various qualifications and no certain identification. So the tablets both confirm continuity and show loss, and they say almost nothing about what any of these gods were thought to be, since an offering list records quantities rather than beliefs.

Connections

Associated With

Ancient Greek Religion

Its offering lists name Greek gods five centuries before Homer.

Artemis

This source names Artemis directly: "Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not invented later."