A Major Milestone in the Further Decipherment of Linear B – the Supersyllabogram Defined

In this post, I shall first illustrate the use of the supersyllabogram PE with 4 Linear B tablets from Knossos in Scripta Minoa, and then provide a basic definition of the supersyllabogram.

The first of these tablets, KN 1232 E d 462, Rams & Ewes in their Sheep Pens, spells out the word PERIQORO peri/boloj an enclosure or pen (nominative) and peri/boloio archaic Greek genitive, “of or from an enclosure or pen”. So on this tablet, there is no problem. We know that we are dealing with enclosures or pens for rams and ewes, i.e. sheep pens, because that is what the word means. Click to ENLARGE this tablet:



However, in the next three tablets, the story is different. Instead of spelling out PERIQORO (nominative) or PERIQOROYO (genitive) in full, the scribe replaces this word with its first syllable only, PE. But the meaning is clear, since all 4 of these tablets appear very closely together in the 1200 E series, with 2 more in the 1300 E series, and since all 11 of these tablets, of which one, KN 1232 E d 462, spells out PERIQOROYO in full, and the other 10 substitute the sypersyllabogram PE, all are formatted identically, with the sypersyllabogram PE on the second line only, not on the first. This implies that only the rams & ewes on the second line are in their sheep pens, while those in the first are not. In other words, the rams and ewes in the first line are free range, as clearly shown by all 3 of the tablets here substituting PE for PERIQORO(Y0). Note also that it is impossible to tell what case PERIOQORO is in on these 3 tablets (or for that matter on the other 7 not posted here), since the first syllable alone of that word gives no hint of the declension.

Click to ENLARGE each of these tablets in turn:







The question is, what on earth is a sypersyllabogram? Our examples make this clear enough. A supersyllabogram is the first syllable only of a specific Mycenaean Greek word in Linear B, standing in for that word and that word only, to the exclusion of all other extant Mycenaean Greek words in Linear B on any tablets, regardless of provenance, or in any Mycenaean Greek – English lexicon. With very few exceptions, supersyllabograms appear immediately before or after a Linear B ideogram, modifying its meaning by narrowing it down to a specific context, one context only and no other. In the case of the supersyllabogram PE, the meaning is clear. PE modifies the ideograms for either ram or ewe (or both) to designate specifically the enclosure or pen in which they are kept, i.e. a sheep pen, and nothing else. This is the beauty and the power of sypersyllabograms. They operate something like our abbreviations today, but not quite the same way, as abbreviations rarely are expressed by the first syllable only of a word. One thing you can bet on is this: the supersyllabogram is always the first syllable of the unique word for which it stands. 

Supersyllabograms are far more common in Linear B than we could have ever imagined. I discovered this, to my amazement, as I went ploughing through some 3,000 Linear B tablets from Knossos in Scripta Minoa. At least 1,000 of them use sypersyllabograms, and what is more, several syllabograms qualify as supersyllabograms.  Among these we count these 12 syllabograms U, KO, MA, MU, NE, PA, PE, PU, TE, WE, ZA and ZE, all of which operate as sypersyllabograms in several tablets. And this list is not complete. In other words, not only are supersyllabograms very common, they constitute another kind of shorthand to which Linear B so often has recourse to (as with logograms and ideograms). In fact, we may safely say, at this point in time, that the Linear B syllabary incorporates to a significant extant the characteristics of a shorthand.

Richard