“The Undeciphered Signs of Linear B: Interpretation and Scribal Practices”: coming soon!

I’m thrilled to say that my monograph based on my PhD, entitled The Undeciphered Signs of Linear B: Interpretation and Scribal Practices, is due to be published in August by Cambridge University Press. I started my PhD in October 2012, submitted it in April 2016, graduated in January 2017, and have been working (on and off) in turning it into a book ever since then. So this announcement feels like it’s been a very long time coming, but the proofs have gone to the printers and the book is available to pre-order on the CUP website, so I guess it’s really happening!

So, what’s the book actually about? The abstract and table of contents are at the end of this post, but essentially, the “undeciphered signs” of the title are the Linear B writing system’s fourteen (out of 87) syllabic signs (shown in the table below) whose sound-values are still unknown or uncertain – so while other signs can be transcribed with the (approximate) sound they represent, these undeciphered ones are officially designated only by numbers. Often, the reason they’re still undeciphered is simply that they’re very rare – the rarest, *86, has just six known examples (though until very recently, it was only five…). Others are more common, but don’t appear in enough words that we can interpret as Greek from context, or for which we can find alternative spellings to tell us how they were pronounced, for us to be able to decipher them (or, in some cases, for everyone to completely agree on the value that many scholars think they probably have).

The Linear B syllabary

In the book’s first chapter, “The (ongoing) decipherment of Linear B”, I introduce the processes involved in the writing system’s 1952 decipherment, when Michael Ventris, building on work by Alice Kober and others, showed it to represent a form of the Greek language; I then discuss the methods which were used after the main decipherment to add to the number of signs with known sound-values, and the reasons why these methods failed in the case of the still-undeciphered signs.

Chapter 2, “Identifying ‘missing’ values in the Linear B syllabary”, sets out the methodology used in the subsequent chapters: by analysing the Linear B signs whose values are known, considering both the structure of the script as a whole and the histories and uses of individual signs, we can gain a much clearer idea of why certain types of signs were (or weren’t) used in Linear B and therefore what further kinds of signs are most (or least) likely to exist in principle amongst the undeciphered signs. Along the way, I end up talking a lot about the motivations underlying the Mycenaean scribes’ use of Linear B – hence, in part, the ‘scribal practices’ in the title – as well as the history of the writing system’s development and its relationship with its parent writing system, Linear A (which was used to write the unknown ‘Minoan’ language).

Chapters 3 and 4 then look respectively at the undeciphered signs we know to have been inherited from Linear A and those which may have been new inventions in Linear B, since the discussion in Chapter 2 shows this to be a crucial distinction in thinking about the kinds of sound-values that may exist. Each of the fourteen signs is discussed in turn, analysing their occurrences and how this relates to my previous conclusions about how signs with particular types of values are most likely to have been used. The aim of these chapters is not to ‘decipher’ any individual sign – in most cases we simply don’t have enough evidence for that. Rather, it’s to see which of the existing ‘gaps’ in the syllabary each sign might most plausibly fit into – for most signs, there is more than one possible answer to that question. What this chapter does is to provide both a much firmer basis for any possible future decipherments – if, for instance, new examples of these signs are found.

Finally, Chapter 5 “Exploring the potential of palaeography with the undeciphered signs”, moves beyond the question of these signs’ possible sound-values to address broader questions about the writing system and the people who wrote it. Using the detailed study of each undeciphered sign carried out in the previous chapters, I analyse their palaeography – the differences in the forms of each sign, as written by different individuals – in the light of their writers’ administrative work within the Mycenaean palaces and of the texts’ chronological distribution. This part of the book is very exploratory, digging into the methods other scholars have been using to assign dates to texts based on their handwriting where the archaeological dating is unclear (which, I show, is something that, at best, we need a lot more work on before we can really rely on dating using this methodology), as well as looking at new ways to use palaeographic analysis in reconstructing the ways the Mycenaean scribes related to each other. Thinking about this during my PhD is what led me to my current and ongoing research into the practices of the people who wrote the Linear B tablets and how can we learn more about them – so watch this space for more on that topic in future!

Abstract:

Decades after Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B and showed that its language was Greek, nearly one-sixth of its syllabic signs’ sound-values are still unknown. This book offers a new approach to establishing these undeciphered signs’ possible values. Analysis of Linear B’s structure and usage not only establishes these signs’ most likely sound-values – providing the best possible basis for future decipherments – but also sheds light on the writing system as a whole. The undeciphered signs are also used to explore the evidence provided by palaeography for the chronology of the Linear B documents and the activities of the Mycenaean scribes. The conclusions presented in this book therefore deepen our understanding not only of the undeciphered signs but also of the Linear B writing system as a whole, the texts it was used to write, and the insight these documents bring us into the world of the Mycenaean palaces.

Table of contents:

1. The (ongoing) decipherment of Linear B
2. Identifying ‘missing’ values in the Linear B syllabary
3. The undeciphered signs inherited from Linear A
4. The undeciphered signs with no certain Linear A correspondences
5. Exploring the potential of palaeography with the undeciphered signs
Conclusions
Appendix: corpus of attestations of the undeciphered signs

 

Cover photo credit: AN1910.218 ‘Page-shaped Linear B tablet, incomplete, 14 rows, listing women workers’. Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. (Published as KN Ap(1) 639 B).

The PhD on which this book is based was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Award at the Cambridge Faculty of ClassicsFaculty of Classics (grant number AH/J500094/1, 2012–2015), the British Federation of Women Graduates’ J. Barbara Northend Scholarship (2015–2016) and a grant from the Cambridge Faculty of Classics’ Graduate Studies Fund (2015). I revised the thesis for publication while a Research Fellow at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.