The famous Ashmolean tablet An_1938_706_o, so many swords:This is one of the most famous of all tablets in Linear B. It is also one of the very first tablets I ever translated from Linear B into English, when I was first learning Linear B in 2012-2013. The literal translation is: tosa pakana = so many swords 50, but it is obvious that the scribe meant: a total of 50 swords. In other words, the formulaic phrase “so many” actually means “a total of”. Remember, this is an inventory.
Tag: Linear B Tablets
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Translation of Ashmolean Museum (British Museum) tablet An_1910_214_o: wheat
Translation of Ashmolean Museum (British Museum) tablet An_1910_214_o: wheat
This is a standard inventory of monthly wheat yields, which come to 100+ bales of wheat (100+ because the number is right-truncated and so it could be anywhere from 100 to 199). If the yield is 100 bales per month, the annual yield is 1,200 bales, and if it is 199, the annual yield is 1188 bales… or anywhere in between. If it is 150 bales per month, that works out to 1,800 bales per year.
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Translation of Ashmolean Museum (British Museum) An1910_214_o: 100 rams
Translation of Ashmolean Museum (British Museum) An1910_214_o: 100 rams
a.k.a. Knossos tablet KN 1646 F j 01.
The Ashmolean Museum of the British Museum contains The Sir Arthur Evans Collection of of a couple of dozen tablets, some of them of major importance. This one deals with sheep, which the greatest number of tablets by far in Linear B deal with. The original tablet here is approximately the correct size. Of some 800 extant tablets with supersyllabograms on them, some 640 or 80% are in the agricultural sector alone, and of these 640, some 580 or 90% deal with sheep! That is amazing by all accounts. There are several supersyllabograms in the agricultural sector, as illustrated here in Table 6, Supersyllabograms for sheep in the agricultural sector of Mycenaean Linear B:
which is to appear in my article, The Decipherment of Supersyllabograms in Linear B, to appear in the next issue of Archaeology and Science (Belgrade) ISSN 1452-7448, Vol. 11 (2015) which is to be published sometime in the spring of 2017.
On this particular tablet, Knossos tablet KN 1646 F j 01, the supersyllabogram is PE which corresponds to the Linear B term, periqoro = an enclosure, sheep pen, for which the ancient Greek equivalent (Latinized) is peribolos. This supersyllabogram appears fourth in the left column of Table 6. Apart from Knossos itself, where the vast majority of sheep were raised, Exonos is one of several islands where the Minoans and Mycenaeans raised sheep.
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Linear B tablet KN 594 R p 11, textiles (military)
Linear B tablet KN 594 R p 11, textiles (military):
Decipherment of textile-related tablets in the military sector presents a few irritating problems. The first of these is that we are crossing sectors, from the military to the textiles, or if you like the converse. It all amounts to the same thing. The problem here is that supersyllabograms, such as KI on this tablet, do not necessarily mean the same thing from one sector to the next. However, this fortunately does not apply to textiles related to military dress, since the supersyllabograms in both sectors mean the same thing. For instance, in this case, KI means kito or “chiton”, is a common Greek tunic in both sectors. The word “rita” on the first line must be very archaic Mycenaean, as I cannot find it anywhere in any Mycenaean Greek lexicon. So it is untranslatable. Likewise for nitewea or satewea. However, whatever this word is supposed to mean, it conveniently ends with “wea”, which leads me to strongly suspect it is a type of cloth, since almost all known words relating to a type of cloth in Mycenaean Greek end in “wea”. And so I have translated it thus.
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Translation of Pylos tablet SA 834, a set of wheels with rims on axle
Translation of Pylos tablet SA 834, a set of wheels with rims on axle:
This tablet presented a couple of irritating little difficulties. Both of the Mycenaean words on this tablet, amepaitoa?ka and wesakee are irretrievably lost to us. They are very archaic Mycenaean. Neither term appears in Chris Tselentis’ excellent Linear B Lexicon. I ransacked the Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary for latter day Classical Greek words that might conceivably correspond to these bizarre words, but came up empty handed. So there is no use banging my head against a wall trying to figure out what they mean. No one does know their meaning, and no one ever will. However, the supersyllabograms TE and ZE make perfect sense in context. You will note that the supersyllabogram TE is oncharged onto the ideogram for wheel. This is the one and only instance in the entire Linear B repertoire where a supersyllabogram is directly oncharged onto the outer circumference of the ideogram, all the more reason why it must mean temidwete, i.e. the rims of wheels. Since ZE always refers to “a pair of”, in this case “(a set of) wheels on axle”, the translation is clearly “wheels with rims on axle.”
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Linear B tablets dealing with teams of bulls or oxen (Post 2): three more tablets
Linear B tablets dealing with teams of bulls or oxen (Post 2): three more tablets
Not much to say here. I said it all in the last post.
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Linear B tablets dealing with teams of bulls or oxen (Post 1): two tablets
Linear B tablets dealing with teams of bulls or oxen (Post 1): two tablets
Unlike Linear B tablets on sheep, of which there are over 500, those dealing with teams of bulls or oxen are very rare, amounting to no more than 7 all told. Although this seems to defy common sense, it actually does not, since the raising of sheep was by far the most important activity of the Minoan/Mycenaean economy. In addition, the text on these tablets on bulls or oxen is so simple and so predictably repetitive that one wonders whether or not the scribes attached much importance to them. The mere fact that two of the tablets repeat the same name, Stomarchos, makes me wonder why any scribe would bother repeating text which is almost identical on two tablets, since this practice is almost unheard of on the tablets dealing with sheep, and on military, vessels and textiles tablets, which are the standard. The two tablets with his name on it do not appear here. Only one of them. But there you have it.
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Rams for ritual slaughter: KN 386 A 87 & KN 387 X c 57 joins
Rams for ritual slaughter: KN 386 A 87 & KN 387 X c 57 joins:
Here I am really digging deep into unknown waters in the decipherment of Linear B, deeper than I ever have.
These two fragments were originally one tablet. The central part is missing. This has got to be one of the most fascinating challenges I have ever encountered in the decipherment of Linear B text, since, as with all Linear B joins, it requires the decipherer to attempt to fill in the blanks, so to speak, i.e. the missing part of the original tablet, which as you can see is in an inverted V shape. If at all possible, as much the text that originally was located within that V has to be restored. Since as everyone knows who visits our blog that I am never one to skip a challenge, no matter how tough, I took it upon myself to make a serious attempt at a plausible reconstruction of at least part of the missing text, and to my satisfaction, I believe I succeeded, in the sense that I have recovered what might plausibly have been some of the original text, at least conjecturally. Any other interpretation might suffice, provided that (a) it made sense in the context of the text preserved on the two adjacent sides & (b) that the missing vocabulary was consistent with the ritual of religious sacrifice of sheep, a common practice in many civilizations of the ancient world.
Let us walk through my decipherment of the so-called missing text step by step. First of all, we have the left truncated syllabograms ... NO heading the first line of the right hand side of the original tablet (KN 387 X c 57). It is no easy matter to even make a stab at what the rest of this word could possibly have meant, or for that matter, how many syllabograms, in other words, syllables, it contained. So I had to take the only recourse available to me, and that was to ransack Chris Tselentis’ excellent Linear B Lexicon of at least 2,500 Linear B words for any word ending in NO which might possibly suit the context, keeping firmly in mind that this is the scene of a religious ceremony involving the ritual sacrifice of a ram or rams. I finally found the term which ideally suited the context, and it is temeno, which means a religious shrine or temple. It fits the context like a glove. So the likelihood that this was indeed the missing word ending with left-truncated NO is reasonably assured. On the second line of the same fragment (the right side), we have repa, the last two syllabograms or syllables of another missing word. The term which immediately leaped to mind was arepa = “cream” or “ointment”, and if that is a putative “correct” translation, it can be interpreted as meaning an “anointing cream”. Fits the bill. The third word on the third line of the right hand side of the fragment, ending in the single syllabogram WE, was much harder to divine. It could be one of a dozen things, but I finally settled on duwowe, meaning “a two handled vessel or urn”. This again suits the context, but it is only one of scores of possible interpretations, all of which would have equally suited the context. I was working on the assumption that the person making the sacrifice, presumably a priest, would have cremated the ashes of the ram(s) after the sacrifice. But this is definitely going out on a limb, since in most ancient societies, sacrificial slaughter of sheep or rams involved killing them and then roasting them on a spit for subsequent consumption in a religious feast honouring “the god” or if Hebrew, God. On the other hand, the Minoans and Mycenaeans may have (also) cremated the ashes of the sacrificed ram. If there is any researcher or archaeologist out there who visits this blog and can refute the notion of post-sacrificial cremation among the Minoans and Mycenaeans, please have at it and I shall revise my decipherment accordingly.
Moving over to the left hand side of the join (KN 386 A 87), which contains considerably less text, we have on the second line the syllabogram QE, which by itself means “and”, but which in this case might possibly be the last syllabogram, i.e. last syllable of a Linear B word... except that scarcely any Linear B words end in QE, and any way the syllabogram QE in this context is written huge. So I am left with no other alternative than to interpret it as I have done = “and”. But “and” what? There you have me. I am stumped. On the next line, the third one down, we have the ideogram for “man” or “person” followed by the number 1, for “one person”, this in turn followed by the supersyllabogram SA, and then by the ideogram for “ram” and the number 1. The SSYL SA I have previously established on another tablet posted on this blog as most likely meaning sapaketeriya = “for ritual slaughter” or “for ritual sacrifice”. This too suits the context very well. You can see the downwards pointing arrow from the ideogram for “man” to the word Towaune = “Towaunes”, presumably the name of the man, on the fourth line. His name in turn is followed by a Linear B word, which, if complete, is doke, a variation on odoke, the aorist (simple past) of the verb didomi (in Linear B), which means “to give” or “to offer”, and in this context “to offer up” (for ritual sacrifice). So now the sense is complete, except for all those single syllabograms (qe wa & po) on the left side of the join, which I can make no sense of at all. And that is a pitfall. However, within these restraints, I have been able to come up with one possible, even plausible interpretation (among God knows how many others), which you can see in translation at the bottom of the figure above.
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Translation of Linear B fragment KN 757 R w 31 & textiles
Translation of Linear B fragment KN 757 R w 31 & textiles:
Nothing much to say here. The tablet speaks for itself.
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Translation of Linear B tablet KN 542 R x 04 & textiles
Translation of Linear B tablet KN 542 R x 04 & textiles:
Nothing much to say about this one. Pretty straightforward.
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Translation of Linear B tablet 530 R l 23, textiles
Translation of Linear B tablet 530 R l 23, textiles:
The translation of this tablet is pretty much self-evident. The only problem is, what does ekesia mean? Is it a person's name or a place name, Ekisia? No one will ever know.
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Translation of Linear B textiles tablet, KN 527 R l 51
Translation of Linear B textiles tablet, KN 527 R l 51:
Apart form being extremely repetitive (and I cannot grasp why the linear B scribe felt so inclined to repeat the same phrase, tetukuwoa = “a kind of cloth” 3 times!), the decipherment is straightforward. I do not know what Ekisia is supposed to mean. I believe it is either a personal name or a toponym (place name).
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Translation of Linear B textiles tablet, KN 474 R q 21
Translation of Linear B textiles tablet, KN 474 R q 21:
This tablet does not present any unexpected problems. The only issue is that we do not know what kind of cloth the supersyllabogram PU refers to. It is called pukateriya in Mycenaean Greek, but since the word is archaic, having fallen out of use with the collapse of the Mycenaean Empire ca. 1200 BCE, there is no way we can recover its precise meaning, i.e. to establish exactly what kind of cloth it refers to. But we do know that the cloth is popureya = purple.
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The famous “Bull’s Head” sacrificial libation Rhyton, Ashmolean Museum, translated
The famous “Bull’s Head” sacrificial Rhyton, Ashmolean Museum, translated:
This is one of the most well-known of all Linear B tablets. It was unearthed by Sir Arthur Evans from the debris at Knossos in the early 1900s. Unfortunately, so much of the text is missing or badly mutilated (left truncated) that it is difficult to translate it. In addition, the words “neqasapi” and “qasapi”, which are variants of one another, are to be found nowhere in Tselentis or any other Mycenaean Greek lexicon, including the most comprehensive of them all, that of L.R. Palmer in The Interpretation of Mycenaean Greek Texts (1963). However, I was able to make sense of the right side of the tablet, which fortunately is largely intact. The Bull’s Head is not just a bull’s head, it is a sacrificial Bull’s Head rhyton, as you can see from my archaic Greek text, here transliterated into Latin characters, “‘r’rhuton kefaleiia tauroio” = “a rhyton of the head of a bull”. There are also 3 kylixes or cups with handles, presumably made of gold. So I was able to extricate enough text to make reasonable sense of this fine tablet.
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Translation of Knossos tablet KN 783 B 0 4: the practioner’s tablet
Translation of Knossos tablet KN 783 B 0 4: the practioner’s tablet
The “practioner’s” tablet appears to refer to a medical practitioner. In classical Greek, the word didaskaleios always refers to a “teacher”. But it cannot literally mean this in Minoan/Mycenaean times, because there was no literature as such to teach. However, medical practitioners or doctors could teach their disciples or students. This is what I believe this tablet is about. I cannot be sure; no one can. In addition to the medical component, there must have also been a religious one, since in the ancient world, medical practices were more often than not, conducted under the auspices of favourable religious omens.
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Linear B tablet KN 755 A e 01, The 14 Temple Door Guards
Linear B tablet KN 755 A e 01, The 14 Temple Door Guards:
The Mycenaean Linear B word turateu is very similar to the ancient Greek word. It is clear (at least to me) that such door guards, in this case 14 of them, would have been responsible for guarding the doors of sacred temples, such as the Hall of the Double Axes, Knossos (if it was one). I have added the genitive, temenoio, which means “of a temple” to indicate that these 14 are temple guards. Notice the double doors to the Hall of the Double Axes (double doors, double axes, probably intentional). These are the kinds of door that would have been guarded at major ceremonies, such as for the King (wanaka) and the Queen (wanakasa).
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Archaeology and Science (illustrations) No, 10 (2014) Post 2 of 2
Archaeology and Science (illustrations) No, 10 (2014) Post 2 of 2 This is the annual serial, Archaeology and Science No, 10 (2014), in which my article, “An Archaeologist’s Translation of Pylos Tablet TA 641-1952”, with translations by both Michael Ventris (1952) and Rita Roberts (2015) appear. This is the most beautiful periodical I have ever seen in my life. I feel truly privileged to have been published in it. Look out for my second article , Archaeology and Science No, 11 (2015)
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Archaeology and Science (illustrations) No, 10 (2014) Post 1 of 2
Archaeology and Science (illustrations) No, 10 (2014) Post 1 of 2 This is the annual serial, Archaeology and Science No, 10 (2014), in which my article, “An Archaeologist’s Translation of Pylos Tablet TA 641-1952”, with translations by both Michael Ventris (1952) and Rita Roberts (2015) appear. This is the most beautiful periodical I have ever seen in my life. It is 274 pp. Long. It is in hard cover, and is worth about $80. The pages are on glossy paper and illustrated in full colour. As an author, I received a complimentary copy.
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The homophone supersyllabogram AI = goat
The homophone supersyllabogram AI = goat:
The supersyllabogram AI is the only homophone (not a regular syllabogram) which qualifies as a supersyllabogram. But it presents an unusual special case. As you can see from the Linear B text, the scribe uses the supersyllabogram for “goat” actually “billy goat” and then, strangely enough (as it would first appear, the ideogram for the same, “billy” goat, followed by the number 1. Then on the second line he uses the ideogram for “she goat”, again followed by the number 1 and by the syllabogram PA right truncated.
If all this seems a mystery to you, it is not to me. The syllabogram PA right truncated on the second line almost certainly means pasi teoi = to all the gods, which in turn implies sapaketeriya = sacrificial rites. That is precisely the reason why the scribe repeats “billy goat”, first as a supersyllabogram and then as an ideogram on line 1. This is no ordinary billy goat. And she is no ordinary she goat. This is a “sacrificial billy goat to all the gods”. The reason why the scribe does not even bother to repeat the supersyllabogram AI for “goat” on the second line is that the SSYL for “goat” on the first line includes both the billy goat and the she goat, his partner. No Linear B scribe in his right mind would ever repeat the same supersyllabogram, in this case AI, twice on the same tablet, for the simple reason that the scribes routinely omitted text (and in this case the SSYL AI on the second line) to save precious space on the tiny Linear B tablets, which rarely (like this one) exceeded 15 cm. (6 inches) in width.
This is the only possible decipherment. I am so sure of it that I would bet my life on it... well, not literally.
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Translation of Pylos tablet TN 996, the famous “bathtub” tablet
Translation of Pylos tablet TN 996, the famous “bathtub” tablet:
This was a rather difficult tablet to translate, for several reasons:
1. It is difficult to ascertain whether or not the first word on the first line is a personal name, but it certainly appears to be so.
2. Two of the words on this tablet appear to refer to some type of vessel or pottery, but they appear in no Linear B lexicon (not even Tselentis). The first is pinera in line 2 & the second pokatama in line 4.
3. Some of the words are definitely archaic Mycenaean Greek, but most of these are translatable. For instance, Linear B rewotereyo = (archaic) Greek “leuterios” in line 1 begins with an abbreviated form of the Greek word “leukos”, which means “white” or “bright” or “light”. So I take this word to mean “a lamp-lighter”, which makes eminent sense in the context.
4. The ideogram is for “bathtub” = asamito in line 1, while the one on line 2 appears to be a variant on the same, but it may mean a “large watering can” to pour warm or hot water into the bathtub.
5. See the comment on po? in the illustration above. The translation “octopi”, meaning “decorated with octopi”, appears solid enough, especially in line 3 where it is paired with the word for “jug”. The translation is less tenable in line 4, where it is paired with “an oil lamp”.
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