College of Humanities
23 Linear B: A Snapshot
Caleb Curtis
Faculty Mentor: Alexis Christensen (Humanities, University of Utah)
Linear B: A Snapshot of the Environment
In the existing literature surrounding the Myceneans (the culture that rose to prominence in the Aegean during the latter half of the Bronze Age c. 1400-1200 BCE) and the world they lived in, the study of the historical climate of the Eastern Mediterranean has become increasingly popular. In light of the crises arising from anthropogenic climate change, there is a desire to look back at the past, to people who endured periods of climate change in order to understand how they endured such changes. One period to which the modern scholar can look is the end of the Bronze Age. Much like today, the latter portion of the bronze age c. 1400-1200 BCE was a time in which the cultures of western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean existed and participated in what can aptly be called a globalized economy, though it is important to note that global here is referring to this particular portion of the world. From the River Nile to the Euphrates, from the Baltic to the Indian Sea, trade was essential for the functioning of the complex societies of the region as well as a key component in the international politics of the time (Cline, 181-184). These ancient peoples both imported and exported goods. Exports included textiles, mainly consisting of linen and wool; metal objects; olives, both the fruit itself and oil; wine; leatherwork; ceramics; furniture; and jewelry (Pomeroy et al. 31, 32). Mycenean society was no different and the various polities governed from the palace complexes that dotted the rugged landscape of Greece participated in these trade networks (Kelder, 339-349).
Record keeping was essential for the successful functioning of the Mycenean centers, and it might well be the spark that ignited the art of writing. In letters and administrative records, the rulers, and bureaucrats of this region of the world recorded the economic exchanges essential to the functioning of these societies. During the late Bronze Age, the Myceneans inhabiting both the mainland and the islands of what is now roughly Greece, used a system now call Linear B. This is a syllabic system that consist of signs representing syllables and pure vowels1. In addition, there are both ideograms representing different ideas such as man, woman, cow, or flax and numerical signs. These symbols record an early form of Greek. Scribes would write in this early Greek script on clay tablets that were often recycled. At Pylos, located in the Peloponnesian peninsula, the recycling of tablets was a normal part of the administrative year (Judson, 135). It is only by accident that tablets have survived to the modern day (Cline, 124). Unluckily for the Myceneans and luckily for us, the palace complexes of the Aegean were destroyed around 1200 BCE. Across most palatial sites there is a layer of debris indicating destruction, a destruction that was often violent. These layers roughly coincide with the end of the Bronze Age period. In these destructive events fires baked the tablets that would have otherwise been recycled allowing them to survive until the present day (Cline, 124).
These Linear B tablets are a valuable asset for any scholar wishing to understand the state of the environment of the Aegean in approximately the last century of the Bronze Age as many of them list agriculture products. Products that are often quite particular in terms of where they will grow. In my translation of the tablets from Pylos, aided by the DAMOS database and Chadwick and Ventris’s book 300 Documents in Mycenean Greek. Here I will be focusing primarily on my translation of the PY Na series, a collection of tablets that deals specifically with linen and/or flax used to produce the linen depending on how you translate the ideogram SA, which can be taken as either (Hooker, 39). For the sake of this discussion, I will refer to SA as linen, the finished textile product. Linen was often used by individuals or groups as a means of paying taxes to the palace, though it could also be used by the palace to pay individuals and communities for services rendered to the palace. The Na tablets more often record tax exemptions rather than actual taxes paid. In the Na series tablets, two formulas indicate a tax exemption. The first consists of the ideogram SA modified by the adjective E-RE-U-TE-RA, which is related to the later Greek ἐλευθερία, which translates to “freedom”. In this context, the adjective translates as something to the effect of “free from the burden of” indicating a tax exemption (Ventris et Chadwick, 299). An alternate formula that is used to indicate a tax exemption is OU-DI-DO-SI taking SA as the direct object. This verb, a compound of οὐ, a particle that negates the verb, much like not in English, and δίδωμι, translates as “they do not give”.
Flax is an environmental taxing crop requires a substantial amount of water to grow properly (Valamoti, 556). The prevalence of flax in the Pylos tablets indicates that Messenia, the region where Pylos sits, had enough moisture to support large scale flax production. Even in the modern era, flax production is an industry important to Messenia. In the 1950’s Messenia was responsible for half of Greece’s flax production (Burke, 437). In the arid Aegean, the presence of flax production is notable as it indicates that there is a significant level of moisture in the region.
The tablets from Pylos provide us with a snapshot of the state of Messenia right before the palace itself was destroyed. This image is one of a Messenia that has enough water and good soil to support large scale flax cultivation. With this in mind, we can look forward intime to other texts that discuss the Messenian region to look for flax production. If there is evidence for flax production in the region from later periods in time, this may indicate that, although the climate might have fluctuated in antiquity, such as the period of aridity that seemed to contribute to the collapse of the Palatial systems in the Aegea, Messenia returned to being a place capable of large-scale flax production, more particularly, the region retained enough moisture to support large-scale flax production.
Bibliography
Aurora, Federico. 2015. DAMOS (Database of Mycenaean at Oslo). Annotating a fragmentarily attested language. In: Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera et al. (eds.), Current Work in Corpus Linguistics: Working with Traditionally-conceived Corpora and Beyond. Selected Papers from the 7th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC2015) (Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 198), 21-31, doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.07.415
Burke, Brenden “Textiles”. in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (ca. 3000-1000 BC). Oxford University Press ed. Eric H. Cline, 430-442. Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Cline, Eric H. 1177 BC: the Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Judson, Anna P. “LEARNING TO SPELL IN LINEAR B: ORTHOGRAPHY AND SCRIBAL TRAINING IN MYCENAEAN PYLOS.” The Cambridge Classical Journal 68 (2022): 133–63. doi:10.1017/S1750270522000057.
Kelder, Jorrit M. “Royal Gift Exchange between Mycenae and Egypt: Olives as ‘Greeting Gifts’ in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean.” American Journal of Archaeology 113, no. 3 (2009): 339–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20627592.
Pomeroy, Sarah B., Stanley Mayer Burstein, Walter Donlan, Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, David W. Tandy, and Georgia Tsouvala. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Valamoti, Soultana Maria. “Flax in Neolithic and Bronze Age Greece: Archaeobotanical Evidence.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 20, no. 6 (2011): 549–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23885227.