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

72 T.G. PALAIMA §12.1.2.1.6
were ‘at Pylos’. He knew that information and would have had no need to be
reminded of it later, tablet by tablet (in the set of tablets beginning with tablet
Aa 240). On the other hand, he wrote the number ‘1’ after each of the
phonetic ideograms for male and female supervisors, because he is very careful
with numbers. Hand 21 on the other hand, in his barley and fig distribution
records (set Ab), sees no need to write ‘1’ after the phonetic abbreviations
TA and DA respectively for the female and male supervisors within
these work groups. Writing the phonetic logograms TA and DA with no
number ‘1’ following them is his way of designating ‘one’ supervisor of each
type. He, and his contemporaries at work at the Palace of Nestor, would not
mistake this usage for an entry where the slots for numbers were left blank
for later.
This compressed or tachygraphic manner of writing down data only creates
problems for us as scholars three thousand two hundred years later because we
are not familiar with the natural assumptions that the individual scribes would
make and we do not know all the information about the topics of their texts
that they knew. This process of reconstructing what the contexts are for individual
texts and how the messages of the tablets are to be interpreted is another
valuable offshoot of the palaeographical study of hands. It falls under the general
heading of ‘text pragmatics’, a tool used by Mycenologists now with very
good results. 75
§12.1.2.1.6. Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. and the palaeography of Knossos, Pylos and
Mycenae
Bennett not only studied the palaeography of the Pylos tablets. In the 1950’s
and into the 1960’s, he identified the different scribes who wrote the inscribed
tablets discovered in ‘houses’ at the site of Mycenae. 76 In producing charts of
characteristic sign shapes for the first group of tablets discovered at Mycenae,
he took care to compare those shapes with the styles of signs inscribed on
tablets at Knossos and Pylos and painted on stirrup jars (Fig. 12.21). His astute
observations about palaeographical traditions that could be discerned among
the texts from Knossos, Pylos and Mycenae led to his attempt to relate these
data to chronological developments within the script. 77
In Fig. 12.22, we see how Bennett tried to trace the evolution of the
ideogram for man over time as part of a general concern for the historical
75 HILLER – PANAGL 2001-2002; PALAIMA 2004b; PANAGL 1979.
76 MT I, 440-445; MT II, 89-95; MT III, 68-70.
77 BENNETT 1960a, 80 and 1966a.