Two scripts, one family
Both scripts are called “linear” because their signs are made of lines scratched into wet clay, unlike the pictures of the earlier Cretan hieroglyphs. Both are syllabaries, that is, each sign stands for a syllable such as ka, po or ti, and both add ideograms, small drawings standing for whole things: a jar of wine, a sheep, a chariot. Many signs look almost the same in the two scripts. The difference is the language behind them.
Linear A was used in the Minoan palaces and towns of Crete, and on some islands, from about 1800 to 1450 BCE. The standard collection of the texts, published by Louis Godart and Jean-Pierre Olivier between 1976 and 1985, counts 1,427 inscriptions from 32 sites: tablets, clay sealings, stone offering tables, even metal objects. The largest archive comes from Hagia Triada, in southern Crete, with 147 tablets and more than a thousand sealings.
Linear B appears at Knossos when Mycenaeans took over Knossos, in the fifteenth century BCE, and then on the mainland, in the palaces of Pylos, Mycenae, Tiryns and Thebes, until about 1200 BCE. It uses around ninety signs for syllables and many more ideograms. Thousands of tablets come from Knossos and more than a thousand from Pylos.
Kept by accident
The tablets were never meant to last. They were made of unfired clay, written while still damp and then simply left to dry, for records that probably covered a single year. They survived because the palaces burned. The fires that destroyed Knossos, Pylos and other centres baked the clay hard, preserving the last accounts of each palace.
How Linear B was cracked
Arthur Evans found the first Linear B tablets at Knossos in 1900, but he published few of them and was convinced they wrote a Minoan language. Carl Blegen found hundreds more at Pylos, on the mainland, from 1939, which suggested the script was used by the Mycenaeans too. Then came the patient work. The American classicist Alice Kober showed in the 1940s that some words changed their endings in regular ways, as in an inflected language. Emmett Bennett established a reliable list of the signs. Michael Ventris, a young English architect who had been fascinated by the tablets since he saw Evans’s finds in London as a boy of fourteen, in 1936, arranged the signs in a grid of shared consonants and vowels.
In 1952 Ventris tried giving some signs the sound values of Greek place names on Crete, such as Knossos and Amnisos, and real Greek words began to appear. On 1 July 1952 he announced on BBC radio that Linear B was Greek. The Cambridge philologist John Chadwick joined him, and in 1956 they published Documents in Mycenaean Greek. Ventris died in a car accident on 6 September 1956, a few weeks before the book came out. In 1953 a tablet found at Pylos the year before had already settled most doubts: it listed tripods and jars, and each word, read as Greek, described the drawing next to it, including a tripod with a broken leg.
What do the tablets say?
Lists. No poems, letters or laws, only accounts: sheep and wool, perfumed oil, bronze given to smiths, rations for women workers, chariot wheels, land holdings, offerings to gods. The lists are dry, but they name the king, the wanax, and many gods later familiar from Homer: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, Athena, Artemis, even Dionysus. One tablet from Knossos records a jar of honey offered to “the Mistress of the Labyrinth”, a phrase that ties the palace to the myth of the Labyrinth.
Why can’t we read Linear A?
We can pronounce it, roughly, because many of its signs look like Linear B signs whose sounds we know. The problem is the result: words that match no known language. Most scholars think the Minoan language was not Greek and probably not Indo-European at all. Three things would help: much longer texts, a bilingual inscription (like the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian hieroglyphs), or a related language to compare with. For now we have none of them, so Linear A gives us names, numbers and the outline of an administration, and little else.
Where to see them
The Heraklion Archaeological Museum on Crete displays tablets in both scripts from Knossos and Hagia Triada. Linear B tablets from Pylos and Mycenae are shown in Athens, at the National Archaeological Museum. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford holds tablets and archives from Evans’s excavation at Knossos. Check displays and opening times with the museums.
Sources
- University of Cambridge, Faculty of Classics, Mycenaean Epigraphy Group (MYCEP): “Michael Ventris” and “The decipherment”.
- L. Godart and J.-P. Olivier, Recueil des inscriptions en linéaire A (GORILA), 5 vols (1976-1985).
- M. Ventris and J. Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (1956).
- J. Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (1958).
- M. Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code (2013), on Alice Kober.
- E. Salgarella, “Linear A”, Oxford Classical Dictionary (2022).
