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

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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.’
§12.1.1.3 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND PALAEOGRAPHY 47 judgment, the scribes used a ‘graceful and convenient script, which admitted considerable variety of personal “handwriting”, from the heavy, plunging strokes of [Fp] 13, [Fp] 48, [V] 684 to the needle-pointed “court-hand” of [Ap] 639, [As] 1516. Several such individual scribes can be recognized, and the personal sign-variants due to their ingenuity or carelessness.’ See Fig. 12.10. As with so many other topics in Minoan archaeology, Evans here points the way toward the future scientific study of scribal ‘hands’. Fig. 12.10. Knossos tablets Fp 13 and Ap 639 (after CoMIK I, 9 and 236)
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