Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Scripts & Magical Alphabets

Linear B

Also Known As Mycenaean Greek Script The script of the Mycenaean palace archives.
Aegean Script Family

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin c. 1450 to 1200 BCE, Mycenaean Greece

Linear B is the syllabic script used for the earliest recorded form of Greek in the Mycenaean palaces, deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952. Its tablets are administrative rather than literary, but their offering lists name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not invented later. The script fell out of use with the palaces around 1200 BCE, and Greek was not written again for roughly four centuries.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
c. 1450 to 1200 BCE, Mycenaean Greece 1
Place of Origin
Bronze Age Greece, particularly Crete and the Mycenaean mainland. 1
Identity
Script Type
Syllabary 1
Learn More
How the Script Was Read

The decipherment is a rare case where the working can be followed. The tablets were unreadable and the language unknown, and the first real progress came from an American scholar who noticed sets of words sharing a stem but differing in their final signs, which showed that the language inflected and allowed a grid to be built relating signs that shared a consonant or a vowel without knowing what either was.

Michael Ventris, an English architect who had worked on the problem since boyhood, extended that grid and then made the guess that broke it open. On the assumption that certain frequently occurring words were place names on Crete, he assigned values that produced recognisable names, and the values so obtained generated Greek words elsewhere. Ventris had long expected the language to be something other than Greek and followed the evidence against his own expectation. Confirmation came from an independent direction shortly afterwards, when a newly excavated tablet listing vessels was found to match the readings against the drawings of the objects beside them. A philologist joined the work and the two published the decipherment together. Ventris died in a road accident a few years later.

Gods Found in an Accounting Record

The tablets were never meant to survive. They are unfired clay records of palace administration, listing rations, livestock, textiles, personnel and offerings, kept for a single year and then discarded, and they exist only because the fires that destroyed the palaces baked them hard. The religious content is therefore incidental: it appears because temples and sanctuaries received allocations that had to be recorded. The names in those allocation lists changed the study of Greek religion.

Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, Artemis and Dionysus appear in Bronze Age records, some five centuries before the earliest Greek literature, which established that these gods were worshipped in the Mycenaean world rather than being later arrivals. Dionysus in particular had been widely treated as a foreign import of a later period, and the tablets made that untenable. They also record deities who did not survive, along with a title meaning the Lady used with various qualifications and no certain identification. So the tablets both confirm continuity and show loss, and they say almost nothing about what any of these gods were thought to be, since an offering list records quantities rather than beliefs.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Ancient Greek Religion, Religions

Its offering lists name Greek gods five centuries before Homer.

Artemis, Deities

This source names Artemis directly: "Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not invented later."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Artemis, Figures

This source names Artemis directly: "Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not invented later."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Athena, Deities

This source names Athena directly: "lists name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not invented later."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Athena, Figures

This source names Athena directly: "lists name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not invented later."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Dionysus, Deities

This source names Dionysus directly: "name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not invented later."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Dionysus, Figures

This source names Dionysus directly: "name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not invented later."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Greece, Regions

The tablets come from the Mycenaean palaces of Greece and Crete.

Hera, Deities

This source names Hera directly: "but their offering lists name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not..."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Hera, Figures

This source names Hera directly: "but their offering lists name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not..."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Homer, Historical Figures

This source names Homer directly: "Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not invented later."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Poseidon, Deities

This source names Poseidon directly: "their offering lists name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not..."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Poseidon, Figures

This source names Poseidon directly: "their offering lists name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not..."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Zeus, Deities

This source names Zeus directly: "but their offering lists name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not..."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick

Related To

Ancient Greek, Languages

It records the earliest known form of Greek.

Linear A, Scripts & Magical Alphabets
Sources
1. The Decipherment of Linear B
John Chadwick, Cambridge University Press, 1958
Documents in Mycenaean Greek, second edition
Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Cambridge University Press, 1973
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.