Tag Archives: Linear B

Ventris Letters Now Available Online

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Back in 2007, the University of Texas Libraries staff digitized and transcribed many of Michael Ventris’ letters held in the archives here at the Program of Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP). They were never fully released and archived onto tape.

This summer (2013) I contacted the UT Libraries staff to see if they still had the files. Colleen Lyon, the Digital Repository Librarian, contacted Wendy Martin in Digitization Services, who managed to restore the six-year-old data from tape. Thanks to UT Libraries, I was able to compile 59 documents from 129 high resolution images and submit them to the UT Digital Repository.

The Michael Ventris Correspondence Collection is available here.

The Collection mainly contains correspondence between Michael Ventris and Alice E. Kober (until her untimely death in 1950) and Emmett L. Bennett from 1948 through 1955. In these letters we see these great minds grappling with Linear B and its decipherment. We see their humor, their acuity, and the way Linear B brought them together in conquering a common challenge.

For example, in this letter in 1954 from Ventris to Bennett, Ventris grapples with putting a grid together based on Kober’s work with inflection.

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Not more than five months later, Ventris excitedly reported to Bennett that he has deciphered Linear B as Greek.

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One wonders whether in his excitement Ventris has handwritten the letter in his clean architect’s handwriting. This was a major surprise for Ventris who had insisted in earlier letters that Linear B might be Pelasgian or Etruscan.

A year later, Ventris sends Bennett a transcription of a tablet from Blegen where they recognize that “tripods” are written out as ti-ri-po-de.

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Other letters detail the work of transcribing and publishing the tablets. These letters truly provide us with a look into the not-so-distant past when Linear B was just being deciphered. Please take your time and read through many of them- you can almost hear the conversations between these great minds.

For more information, you may also be interested in the Alice E. Kober papers. Back in 2012, Zachary Fischer and I worked to digitize Alice E. Kober’s paper correspondence. Her work was essential in the decipherment of Linear B, especially with Ventris’ understanding of inflection. That Digital Repository Collection is available here.

Posted July 26, 2013 by Dygo Tosa, Research Assistant – PASP

Palaima Article on kosmos in Mycenaean palatial culture

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—“Kosmos in the Mycenaean Texts: The Response of Mycenaean ‘Scribes’ to the Culture of Kosmos,” M.-L. Nosch and R. Laffineur eds., Kosmos: Jewellery, Adornment and Textile in the Aegean Bronze Age (Aegaeum 33, Leuven – Liège 2012) 697-703 + figures CLIX-CLX.

In this article I discuss the significance of the etymology of the word ‘kosmos’ and the importance of the principle of ‘order’ in Mycenaean palatial culture as understood in the organizational system worked out by the palatial centers and structures, in the aesthetics of the ‘order’ of palatial architecture, and in the texts of the Mycenaean scribes. The very process of recording information was an imposition of order. We discuss passages from Homer and Hesiod and make reference to Continue reading →

April 11, 2011

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From Michael Cosmopoulos and Cynthia Shelmerdine

Readers of Aegeanet clearly share our excitement at the discovery of a Linear B tablet from Iklaina. In the last few days it has led to some good publicity for the Aegean Bronze Age. But since media reports rarely transmit information with complete accuracy, we’d like to offer the following brief account of the context and content of the tablet. A full publication will appear as soon as practicable.

Context and date: The tablet was found in a burned refuse pit containing diagnostic pottery of LH IIB/LH IIA1/early LH IIIA2 date and is, therefore, earlier than the tablet from the Petsas House at Mycenae. Palaeographically the signs resemble those on tablets from the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos, and the four (not five) early tablets from Pylos. Phylogenetic analysis by C. Skelton (cf. her article in Archaeometry 50, 2008, 158-176) bears out a date earlier than the main Pylos archive.

Content: The tablet is broken at bottom, one side, and perhaps also at the top, which is uneven. On the front side (recto), a probable man’s name is preserved in the first extant line, followed by the number 1. We read in the fragmentary second line ]ṇụ-o-wo[ , probably the end of another name (cf. the name ]ṛụ-o-wo on Knossos Sc 130). The back side (verso) is determined by the more slanting ductus of the signs, a point observed by J.L. Melena. It preserves a participial ending, attested at Knossos and Pylos as perfect active in form, with an intransitive-passive sense. The closest parallel is te-tu-ko-wo-a (‘fully finished’), attested at Knossos with reference to cloth (KN L 871.b, restored on KN X 7846), and in the variant te-tu-ko-wo-a2 at Pylos with reference to wheels (PY Sa 682). te-tu-]ko-wo-a is a plausible restoration on the Iklaina tablet, though of course not certain.

Thus the tablet may present a personnel list on one side, and a verb form possibly linked to manufacturing on the other. The really interesting point is that this is the first tablet ever found at a secondary center in a Mycenaean state. We think that Richard Hope-Simpson and John Bennet are right in identifying Iklaina as the district capital a-pu2 (Alphys, vel sim.) in the Hither Province of Pylos. If the date of the tablet is not later than LH IIIA1/early LH IIIA2, as the evidence suggests, it represents either a phase of independent written accounting predating a Pylian takeover, or the very early stages of state bureaucracy. Either way, it opens a window into a state of administration barely attested at Pylos itself.