Rita Roberts’ Translation of Knossos Tablet K 1092, Rams at Ekzonos (Outside the Belt) & Sygrita: Click to ENLARGE


Rita’s translation of this particular tablet is as polished as are all of her translations. The only real difficulty Rita still has to deal with in deciphering Linear B tablets is that her first encounter with Greek, ancient or modern, was with Mycenaean Greek in Linear B, which is the exact reverse approach pretty much everyone on earth has to take when acquiring a knowledge of Greek... everyone that is to say except Rita. This just so happens to be greatly in her favour, though, because since she is obliged to decipher Linear B tablets straight into Mycenaean Greek, with no intermediary steps into ancient Greek getting in her way, she very often discovers meaning(s) for Linear B words which elude those of us who have a prior solid knowledge of ancient Greek, let alone modern. In other words, her translation do not suffer from bias which is far too often unnecessarily introduced by scholars of ancient Greek, such as myself, who also know Linear B. So Rita has tripped me up on more than one occasion, and she will again... and again... well, at least until she has to learn a little ancient Greek, at least enough to be able to read the ancient Greek equivalent texts of all the Linear B tablets we have posted so far on our blog (and that is scores of them!) and which we will be continuing to post.  For the time being, though, Rita can safely rest on her laurels. When the time comes for her to master at least a modicum of ancient Greek, she and I will as always work together as the fine team we are. 

I for one have not yet even mastered modern Greek, but it appears I shall have to, because although I can read it (sort of), I must be able to read the several articles which appear only in modern Greek on Linear A, B, C, the Iliad etc. Otherwise, I am going to miss out on some very important research. So as you can see, folks, both Rita and I are going to have to eventually “graduate” to the next level.


Richard