Linear B Tablets

Some five to six thousand clay tablets and fragments, more than four thousand of them from Knossos alone, inscribed in an approximately ninety-sign syllabic script scholars call Linear B, found chiefly at the Mycenaean Greek palace of Knossos on Crete, where the main archive was baked and preserved by the fire that destroyed the palace around 1375-1350 BC, and at Pylos, Thebes, Mycenae, and other mainland palace centers, most destroyed and their archives fired around 1200 BC; Thebes has since yielded a substantial and still-growing archive of its own, and Mycenae a smaller one. Deciphered only in 1952, by the amateur architect Michael Ventris working with the Cambridge classicist John Chadwick, the script was shown to encode not some pre-Greek Minoan language, as most specialists had assumed, but an early and archaic form of Greek, at a stroke pushing the attested history of the Greek language back roughly five centuries before the alphabetic inscriptions of the archaic period.

The tablets themselves are exclusively administrative: inventories of grain, wine, oil, and livestock, tax and ration records, and lists of specialized workers (bronzesmiths, perfume-makers, textile workers) and of war materiel, chariots, arms, armor. Nothing resembling literature, law, or private correspondence survives, and nothing was likely ever meant to; the tablets were sun-dried working documents for a single accounting year, never intended for long-term storage, and survive today purely by the accident of the fires that should have destroyed them instead baking them hard enough to endure three thousand years underground.

When the Mycenaean palace system collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, in the general eastern Mediterranean upheaval of the 12th century BC, Linear B literacy collapsed with it. It was a palace technology, taught to and used by a narrow class of professional scribes for bureaucratic record-keeping alone, with no independent tradition of literary or private writing to survive the institutions that trained its scribes. On the mainland and Crete, Greek went unwritten until the adoption of the Phoenician-derived alphabet in the 8th century BC; only on Cyprus did a related syllabary carry Greek in writing across the intervening centuries, a thin thread of continuity beside the mainland's genuine gap.