Linear Script Research Articles

Inscriptions in the Minoan Linear Script of Class A. By W. C. Brice.

<i>Inscriptions in the Minoan Linear Script of Class A</i>. By W. C. Brice.

Inscriptions in the Minoan Linear Script of Class A

Inscriptions in the Minoan Linear Script of Class A

(W. C.) Brice Inscriptions in the Minoan Linear Script of Class A, edited from the Notes of Sir Arthur Evans and Sir John Myres. London: The Society of Antiquaries. 1961. Pp. xii + 33. 3 tables. 62 plates (+ 19 of vocabulary). £3 3s. 0d.

(W. C.) Brice Inscriptions in the Minoan Linear Script of Class A, edited from the Notes of Sir Arthur Evans and Sir John Myres. London: The Society of Antiquaries. 1961. Pp. xii + 33. 3 tables. 62 plates (+ 19 of vocabulary). £3 3s. 0d. - Volume 82

En gammelkretisk gåde

En gammelkretisk gåde

229. The Decipherment of the Minoan Linear Script B and the Problem of the Linear Script A.

229. The Decipherment of the Minoan Linear Script B and the Problem of the Linear Script A.

Mycenaean Deciphered

It was Minoan writing that led Arthur Evans to Crete. In Greek antique shops and elsewhere he had seen certain stone signets, each with three or four facets inscribed with what he felt sure were characters of some prehistoric system of writing (cf. Suppl. PL CLXXVII (a)); they were alleged to come from Crete. After a visit to that island in 1894 to collect further evidence he was able to recognize, besides these ‘hieroglyphs’, a later and more linear type of writing occasionally scratched on vessels of pottery or stone from prehistoric sites in Greece and Crete. In a long article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1894 he hazarded some remarkable conclusions from this scanty evidence: that although the ‘hieroglyphs’ probably concealed a pre-Greek language, the later, linear script might have been used for writing Greek; and that this linear script was a syllabary somehow related to the syllabary used in Cyprus in historical times as an alternative to the Greek alphabet. He was right on both points; but paradoxically his excavations at Knossos, begun in 1900 in pursuit of the origins and history of these scripts, led him gradually farther from the truth. Within the first week of digging he had begun to unearth clay tablets written in what he later dubbed ‘Linear B’ script (cf. Suppl. Pis. CLXXVIII (a), (b), CLXXIX and CLXXX (a)); and they were associated with objects at once identified as belonging to the Mycenaean civilization known from mainland Greece since Schliemann's excavations in the 1870'8. Further exploration, however, revealing the earlier stages of the civilization of Knossos, made it necessary to distinguish a distinct ‘Minoan’ civilization, in many ways a parent of the Mycenaean. Evans saw this civilization more and more as continuous, and as non-Greek. The corollary of this would be that the hieroglyphic script and the two linear scripts that succeeded it (for he now recognized an intermediate stage—‘Linear A’ (cf. Suppl. PI. CLXXVII (cj)—as well as the Linear B of his Knossos tablets)—all represented one non-Greek ‘Minoan’ language.

The Decipherment of Linear Script B - Jane Elizabeth Henle: A Study in Word Structure in Minoan Linear B. Pp. v+185. New York: privately printed (obtainable from the author, 299 West 12th Street, New York 14). 1953. Paper. - Michael Ventris and John Chadwick: Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives. (Reprinted from Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. lxxiii.)

The Decipherment of Linear Script B - Jane Elizabeth Henle: A Study in Word Structure in Minoan Linear B. Pp. v+185. New York: privately printed (obtainable from the author, 299 West 12th Street, New York 14). 1953. Paper. - Michael Ventris and John Chadwick: Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives. (Reprinted from <i>Journal of Hellenic Studies</i>, vol. lxxiii.)

Minoan Inscriptions - A. J. Evans: Scripta Minoa. Volume II: The Archives of Knossos: Clay Tablets inscribed in Linear Script B. Edited from notes and supplemented by J. L. Myres. Pp. viii+114; about 1700 line drawings; 83 collotype plates. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Cloth, £10. 10s. net.

Minoan Inscriptions - A. J. Evans: Scripta Minoa. Volume II: The Archives of Knossos: Clay Tablets inscribed in Linear Script B. Edited from notes and supplemented by J. L. Myres. Pp. viii+114; about 1700 line drawings; 83 collotype plates. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Cloth, £10. 10s. net. - Volume 4 Issue 1

Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives

With the fuller publication of the material found by Blegen at Ano Englianos in 1939 (The Pylos Tablets, Dr. Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., Princeton, 1951) and by Evans at Knossos in 1899–1904 (Scripta Minoa, Vol. II, ed. Sir John Myres, Oxford, 1952), it has at last been possible to undertake a systematic study of the Minoan–Mycenaean texts written in Linear Script B. Their decipherment is now the central problem in Aegean archaeology, accentuated by the discovery, in the summer of 1952, of many new tablets by Blegen at Pylos and by Wace at Mycenae.Evans believed that Linear B (first found in the L.M. II palace of Knossos, c. 1400 B.C., and thereafter the exclusive script of the Mainland down to the ‘Dorian invasion’) was an administrative revision of Linear A, designed to express the same ‘Aegean’ language; and that Minoan colonisation of the Mainland was responsible for its occurrence at Pylos, Tiryns, Thebes, and Eleusis.

Scripta Minoa: the Written Documents of Minoan Crete with special reference to the Archives of Knossos. By Arthur J. Evans. Vol. 2. The Archives of Knossos: Clay Tablets inscribed in Linear Script B. Edited from notes and supplemented by John L. Myres. 12¼ × 9¼. Pp. viii + 14 + pls. 97. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1952. 10 guineas.

Scripta Minoa: the Written Documents of Minoan Crete with special reference to the Archives of Knossos. By Arthur J. Evans. Vol. 2. The Archives of Knossos: Clay Tablets inscribed in Linear Script B. Edited from notes and supplemented by John L. Myres. 12¼ × 9¼. Pp. viii + 14 + pls. 97. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1952. 10 guineas. - Volume 32 Issue 3-4

The Minoan Signary

In studying the Linear Scripts of Minoan Crete, the first requisite is an agreed ‘signary,’ a customary order of the signs, with a numeration by which they can be quoted, at all events until their phonetic values are ascertained. Hitherto, everyone who has written on these scripts has had a signary-order of his own; and, at the risk of adding momentarily to this chaos, here is an attempt to arrange the signs of both the A- and the B-Scripts in an order which will be easy to memorise, because it will be based upon a classification of the signs by their forms and apparent origins.Though Sir Arthur Evans described the Linear Scripts in general terms in Scripta Minoa I, 1909, he reserved detailed discussion to Vol. II, which was still unpublished at his death in 1940. But in The Palace of Minos I, in 1921, he printed a tabular numerical list of Script A, and in Vol. IV, in 1936, a similar list of Script B. Unfortunately, neither list is quite complete, and though there are many obvious resemblances between the two sets of signs, the numerical order of the two lists is different; so that it is difficult to construct vocabularies of the sign groups which can be cross-referred. In both lists he seems to have begun with the signs which more or less resembled letters in the Greek alphabet, but this principle of classification soon failed him. He grouped signs resembling animals and cereal crops at the end of Script B, but left other pictorial signs unclassified and mixed with purely linear forms. In The Palace of Minos IV, 681–2, is outlined a classification into phonetic, idiographic, commodity-signs ‘relating to various properties,’ and administrative signs; but it was not developed in detail.

An Inscription from Kythera

While collecting information about the early history of Kythera I recently came across a short communication from Leake in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, Vol. IV (new series), 1853. It is in the form of a letter to the Secretary, and entitled ‘ Some remarks on the Island Cerigo, anciently Cythera,’ and reproduces an extract translated by Mr. Hamilton from a Memoir on the island sent to the latter by Mr. Calucci, an inhabitant of Kythera, on Oct. 3rd, 1849. On p. 4 he gives a copy of an inscribed stone found at Palaiopoli (Scandeia) which he describes thus: ‘ A small rectangular piece of hard white stone, one inch (sic) in length and ten lines thick; its lower surface has deep cuttings in it so as to form five half cylinders. On the upper surface, which is highly polished, is the inscription in five lines represented in the annexed drawing (Fig. 2). The measurement given appears impossibly small and must be a mistranslation of the original Greek (or Italian).The paper is known to Pauly-Wissowa. Weil (AM v, 1880, pp. 293 f.) mentions it and copies the late Greek inscription also illustrated there, but takes no notice of our inscription, and no scholar interested in Minoan or early Asia Minor scripts seems to have any knowledge of it. Some, but not all, of the signs are found in the Minoan linear script, a few also in the Cypriote syllabary.

On the Linear Script of Knossos

On the Linear Script of Knossos