16 Facts About Linear B

Linear B was a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek.

Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Cydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae, disappeared with the fall of Mycenaean civilization during the Late Bronze Age collapse.

Linear B, deciphered by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris—based on the research of American classicist Alice Kober—is the only Bronze Age Aegean script to have thus far been deciphered.

Application of Linear B appears to have been confined to administrative contexts.

Linear B has roughly 200 signs, divided into syllabic signs with phonetic values and ideograms with semantic values.

Related searches

Inscriptions in Linear B have been found on tablets, stirrup jars and other objects; they are catalogued and classified by, inter alia, the location of the excavation they were found in.

Oldest Linear B tablets are probably those from the Room of Chariot Tablets at Knossos, and date to the latter half of the 15th century BC.

An amber seal incised with Linear B signs was found in 2000 by amateur archaeologists at Bernstorf near Kranzberg, southern Germany, and is of much debated authenticity.

Main archives for Linear B are associated with these stages of Late Minoan and Helladic pottery:.

Linear B did not explicitly define these terms, causing some confusion among subsequent writers concerning what he meant, but in 1898 he wrote "These linear forms indeed consist of simple geometrical figures which unlike the more complicated pictorial class were little susceptible to modification, " and "That the linear or quasi-alphabetic signs.

Linear B established the Cretan Exploration Fund, with only his own money at first, and by 1896 the fund had purchased one-fourth of Kephala Hill, on which the ruins were located, with first option to buy the rest.

One or two more volumes publishing the Linear A and Linear B tablets were planned, but Evans ran out of time; the project required more than one man could bring to it.

Linear B's followed this with the book A Clue to the Cretan Scripts, published in 1931.

About the same time, Alice Kober studied Linear B and managed to construct grids, linking similar symbols in groups of threes.

Any Linear B tablets are written in a language other than Greek still remains to be demonstrated; but that words and usages not exactly paralleled in later Greek occur is both certain and to be expected.

Linear B was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2003 with the release of version 4.