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

70 T.G. PALAIMA §12.1.2.1.5
These hesitations, corrections and ad hoc ways of presenting information
(amply paralleled at Knossos 68 ) are not as ‘famous’ as those on Tn 316. They
are spread out over a set of thirteen different tablets, and the items being
recorded are varying. The Ta set constitutes a full record of an inventory of
sacrificial and ceremonial paraphernalia, including ritual knives, stunning
axes and exquisitely inlaid furniture, taken at the time of an important public
occasion involving the wa-na-ka, wanaks or king of Pylos. But the contents of
the records are not sensational.
Consequently the changes and mistakes on the Ta tablets have almost
never been noted (except by the editors of the texts); and, of course, their
implications have never been magnified, as on Tn 316, by dramatic scenarios
about crisis situations, ‘human sacrifice’ and the like. But these features on
the Ta tablets by an important tablet-writer (Hand 2, who is arguably the
close associate of the ‘master scribe’ at the site, Hand 1) certainly are more
extreme in their cumulative total than the reformatting and the few omissions
of signs in Tn 316. Hand 2 writes some of the most important texts from
Pylos. 69 His work in the Ta series thus demonstrates that even skilled scribes
hesitate, experiment and make mistakes, but that it did not matter, so long as
the end result was useful to the scribes and administrators of the Mycenaean
centres.
The most important lesson is this. Mycenaean scribes not only make
mistakes, but they also often leave them. Why? Because they can. What they
are concerned with is getting the information clear, accurate and retrievable.
No mistakes of consequence would be let stand, except by oversight.
The tablet-writer of Tn 316, 70 Hand 44, writes his signs (phonograms and
ideograms) very carefully and elegantly. At the beginning, he does experiment
with how to format the complicated information he has to record. Eventually he
devises a way to write down the information about offerings of golden vessels to
deities at different sanctuaries in the district near Pylos known as Sphagianes.
68 DRIESSEN 2000, 59, provides statistics for Knossos. In the Room of the Chariot Tablets, out of
608 tablets, 30 are palimpsests (4.93%), i.e., their original texts were completely erased and
written over, and 95 show traces of erasure (15.6%). These statistics for scribal hesitation and
confusion may seem even more remarkable when we consider that 417 of these tablets (64%)
contain fewer than 3.67 signs (DRIESSEN 2000, 26). I.e., these corrections are being made on
tablets with very simple entries. Elsewhere at Knossos, there are 508 tablets with erasures and
47 palimpsests. When we analyze the percentages, we see that 15.3% of the total number of
non-RCT tablets have erasures — a percentage almost exactly identical to the RCT percentage.
But only 1.42% of non-RCT tablets are palimpsests (vs. 4.93% for the RCT tablets).
69 Scribes Pylos, 59-68. Hand 2 clearly was trained under or alongside Hand 1, whose handwriting
style his (Hand 2’s) closely resembles.
70 PALAIMA 1999.