A Companion to Linear B - The University of Texas at Austin

46 T.G. PALAIMA §12.1.1.3
From 1945 until 1950, Bennett and Kober were in close contact (meeting
often because of geographical proximity — he was at Yale University in New
Haven, Connecticut and she was at Brooklyn College — and through correspondence).
They both had done their own independent and painstaking analyses
of the bodies of Linear B material available to them (Bennett primarily with
the Pylos tablets; and Kober with the Knossos tablets). They eventually swapped
full information about the Pylos and Knossos Linear B material, after first
obtaining the approval of Carl W. Blegen and Sir John L. Myres respectively
in late November 1948.
§12.1.1.3. The roots of the Mycenaean palaeography
The Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) at the University of
Texas at Austin has preserved the scholarly papers of Bennett and Kober.
Besides work notes, drafts, proofs, notebooks and note cards, grant applications,
and photographs and drawings of texts, there are also letters between them and
Myres, Ventris, Johannes Sundwall, and other leading figures interested in the
Linear scripts before and after the Ventris decipherment in 1952. 21 These help
us to see the process of decipherment more clearly. But they also reveal for the
first time the very roots of the field of Mycenaean palaeography.
It is almost fashionable now to criticize Evans for all the things that he did
not do. 22 It is a good antidote to some of the poison that has been administered
to the ghost of Evans to read what Kober writes to Bennett on April 8, 1948:
‘Evans’ transcriptions are about 99% reliable, which is pretty good, but not
perfect.’ She also writes on June 3, 1948: ‘Evans’ drawings are almost always
absolutely accurate. He occasionally omits a sign in a word, but the signs he
draws are practically always what is visible in an inscription, and reproduce
the idiosyncrasies of the ‘hands’ — at least for those where photographs are
available.’
Evans was also sensitive to the details of handwriting that fascinate and inform
palaeographers. In discussing the Linear B texts from Knossos, Evans remarks
on both general aesthetics and particular, i.e., personal, styles of writing. 23 In his
21 See: http://www.utexas.edu/research/pasp/; and for the archives of early researchers: http://
www.utexas.edu/research/pasp/venkoba.html (Ventris and Kober) and http://www.utexas.edu/
research/pasp/bennetta.html (Bennett).
22 See PALAIMA 2000a.
23 SM II, 2, as noted in Scribes Cnossos, 36. Evans also remarks (SM II, 3) that ‘[o]n the
moist clay, erasures and corrections were possible, and where the stylus was allowed to graze
the tablet between strokes, it has left valuable elucidations of ill-written signs or personal
variants.’