How it began
Linear B was a syllabic script used in the Aegean in the second millennium BCE. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica it was an adapted form of Linear A, borrowed by Mycenaean Greeks from the Minoans, and as a way of writing Greek it was developed about 1400 BCE. The earliest known examples date to around 1450 BCE. It is known mainly from clay tablets found in the palaces at Knossos and Chania on Crete and at Pylos, Mycenae, Tiryns and Thebes on the Greek mainland, dating from about 1400 to 1200 BCE.
Before it existed
The script that came first, Linear A, was in use on Minoan Crete and has not been deciphered; it was perhaps used to write the Minoan language. At Knossos, Britannica records, it was replaced by Linear B, identical to the script used at Mycenae. The detailed administrative records in Linear B found there indicate that by that time the Mycenaean rulers of the city controlled much of central and western Crete.
How it works
The script is strictly syllabic. Each pairing of a consonant with a vowel has its own sign, so a word is spelled as a string of syllables. Scholars number the signs from 1 to 87. Its use seems to have been confined mostly to administration at the palaces. Among the thousands of clay tablets, the handwriting of a fairly small number of scribes has been detected: 45 at Pylos and 66 at Knossos. More than 100 very short inscriptions painted on vases have also been found on Crete and the mainland.
Who pushed back
Arthur Evans, who classified the scripts of Knossos, held that Linear B did not record Greek, and that was the general view. Michael Ventris, an English architect, shared it until his own work showed otherwise. He announced on BBC Radio on 1 July 1952 that the language was a difficult and archaic Greek. The decipherment met some skepticism at first, and Saul Levin still argued in 1964 for a partly non-Greek reading. From the mid-1950s support from scholars such as Carl Blegen and Sterling Dow brought wide acceptance.
What lasted
The script went out of use with the fall of Mycenaean civilization in the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, several centuries before the Greek alphabet appeared. Its decipherment by Ventris with the philologist John Chadwick, built on the research of the American classicist Alice Kober, showed Greek in writing centuries earlier than had been accepted, in a form about five hundred years older than Homer. Their book Documents in Mycenaean Greek was published in 1956.
Where it stands today
Linear B tablets are kept in museums in Greece; one from Pylos of the thirteenth century BCE is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and the Knossos tablets went to the museum at Heraklion on Crete. Linear A, the script it was adapted from, remains undeciphered. Britannica notes that the Linear B texts are sparse and hard to interpret, and that the date of the earliest ones, possibly as far back as 1400 BCE, is disputed.
