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

66 T.G. PALAIMA §12.1.2.1.5
Besides listing three different shape of golden vessels (a bowl, a Mycenaeanstyle
stemmed cup or ‘kylix’, and a Minoan-formed stemmed cup or ‘chalice’)
the tablet also clearly records human beings. The phonetic texts make clear that
the vases are conceived of as do-ra, unambiguously interpreted as dora, ‘gifts’.
These vases are being ‘brought’ (pe-re = pherei) to various sanctuaries in which
specific deities, major and minor, are targeted as recipients. The human beings
are listed in each case after the entries for the golden vases. They are listed by
the ideograms for ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and also by the lexeme po-re-na. Some
scholars 62 have interpreted these men and women as human sacrificial victims.
This was further thought to be the kind of extreme ritual measure that only a
state of emergency within early Greek culture could have produced. Likewise,
then, the state of writing itself on Tn 316 was viewed as caused by the haste
and panic with which this tablet was written in a time of crisis.
It has, however, now been shown that tablet Tn 316 could not have been
written as the palatial centre at Pylos was about to be destroyed. It was filed
in quadrant 23 of the tablet-filing room in the archives complex, Room 8
(Fig. 12.15), well before other tablets were brought to the central archives. 63
Strangest of all, no one proposing this type of hasty state-of-emergency hypothesis
asked a key follow-up question. If tablet Tn 316 was written in extreme
haste as the Palace of Nestor was burning down, how could it, under such dire
circumstances, be left to dry to a degree where the tablet-writer would come
back later and test its surface by making abrasions and writing graffiti to see
whether it could still be written on?!!!
Furthermore we know that after Tn 316 was filed away in Room 8, tablets
of the Ta series, dealing with ritual vessels, furniture and sacrificial implements,
and tablet Un 718, dealing with food provisions for a feast in honor of
Poseidon, were among the last tablets brought to the archives. They were found
in a unique location, to the left of the entrance door in Archives Room 7.
The fact that tablet Tn 316 was placed in systematic storage by whatever
tablet-writer took care of filing completed records also implies that the scribal
administrators who were responsible for ‘data and record storage’ in the central
archives accepted the document as suitable and usable, i.e., as containing information
in a legible and accurately retrievable form. This fact de ipso calls into
question opinions that the text of Tn 316 was written hastily and carelessly and
that, in its current state, the information it contained would have been problematical
for a Mycenaean scribal administrator to use.
62 BAUMBACH 1983, 33-34 et passim, for Pylos Tn 316, human sacrifice and the ‘state of emergency’
hypothesis. SACCONI 1987 is one of the few relatively early scholars to argue against this view.
63 PALAIMA 1995a, 628-632.