Linear B Syllabary

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             In the ancient world before there was an alphabet as we know it today there were, at least in Greece, two forms of pictorial writing that we have come to know as Linear A and Linear B. While we don’t exactly know where Linear A originated from we do know that Linear B had come into being sometime either during or right before the Minoan period of Greek culture which lasted approximately from 2,600 to 1,150 BC. Linear B had also survived as a method of writing during the fall of the Palaces in 1,400 BC and began to appear in Mycenaean Greek culture most notably near Pylos only to eventually die out as fewer and fewer scribes knew how to use it.

The main site that the modern world has discovered Linear B was at the Palace of Knossos on the Island of Crete which was the home of the fabled King Minos who used to send young Athenians to the labyrinth to ultimately meet their doom with the Minotaur. This palace was among the many to fall during the destruction of Greek palaces we believe either by some natural disaster or the supposed return of the descendants of Heracles, either way Knossos was engulfed in a great fire which helped to preserve the Linear B clay tablets. The second site we have found tablets are at the palace of Pylos in the southwest Peloponnese just west of Sparta. We believe that these tablets are younger than the ones at Knossos and were probably the result of either fleeing or captured scribes that still used the language as a means to catalog inventories.

            The credit for the initial discovery of Linear B is given to Arthur Evans who following the footsteps of Heinrich Schlieman who discovered the city of Troy that is mentioned in Homer’s The Iliad. Evans ended up by half the property on which he hoped to find the palace of Knossos in 1895 and began to excavate the site; about five years later in 1900 he bought the second half of the property. One week into the excavation of Knossos Evans discovered the Archive room at Knossos which held 2,000 clay tablets. Although Arthur Evans was the original discoverer of Linear B it was Michael Ventris who decided in 1936 while attending Evan’s lecture on Knossos and both Linear scripts that he would grow up to Decipher Linear writings.

For Further Reading about Linear B syllabary please consult the sources below

1. John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B, Cambridge University Press (1958)
2. John Chadwick, The Mycenaean World, Cambridge University Press (1976)
3. Barbara Ann Kipfer, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archeology, Library of Congress, Pg. 704, http://books.google.com/books?id=XneTstDbcC0C&lpg=PA704&ots=nacw__3WnO&dq=kober's%20triplets&pg=PR4#v=onepage&q&f=false