ABSTRACT
Almost half a century ago the Mycenaean period was fully prehistoric in the sense that it was ‘text-free’. (The Homeric poems, some aspects of whose historicity are considered in Appendix 2, are not of course contemporary texts.) But thanks to a combination of cryptographic detective work and linguistic scholarship it is now possible to read some of its documents. These are the accidentally baked clay tablets of varying shapes and sizes inscribed in ‘Linear B’, a syllabary devised to transcribe an early form of the Greek language. We cannot say certainly where or when the syllabary was invented, but the few findspots of the tablets are significant: Knossos, Pylos, Mycenae, Thebes and Tiryns. To these we may add the sites which have produced vases inscribed with Linear B symbols: Eleusis, Kreusis, Orchomenos, Chania and now the Menelaion site (Catling 1977, 34). The syllabary’s total attested number of symbols (signs and ideograms) is about 200. To judge from the evidence of handwriting, the only available criterion, there were about 100 scribes working at any one time at Knossos, about fifty at Pylos. The contexts in which the tablets were found may be spread over a period of up to two centuries (c.1375 at Knossos to c.1200 at Pylos), but little or no stylistic development is discernible. The tablets reveal the existence of a basically agrarian economy with a developed division of labour and a multiplicity of social statuses and factors of production.
