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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

78 T.G. PALAIMA §12.1.2.3 kinds of clay documents mainly record individual items or groups of items and single to a few transactions. Their range of subjects is restricted. They can be found in direct associations with work materials or stored paraphernalia. In working on the Pylos material, an emphasis was also given to using a full array of secondary criteria both to confirm (or cast doubt upon) the purely palaeographical identification of individual hands and to help to define the personalities of individual scribes, i.e., their habits of spelling, formatting, linguistic peculiarities (idiolect), and tablet construction (size, shape, clay composition, color, other alterations to the physical carriers of the texts) and use. 88 88 Scribes Pylos, 27-31. Fig. 12.25. Pylos tablet Cn 599 (after Scribes Pylos, 54, fig. 7, annotation by K. Pluta)
§12.1.2.3 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND PALAEOGRAPHY 79 For example, Hand 1, the master scribe at the site, 89 is almost obsessive about not using any more clay than is necessary for given records. He even trims excess clay away from his tablets (see below). This is done for two reasons of economy. First, not to waste any of the finely levigated clay from which the tablets are generally made. Second, to make sure the records are not bigger than they need to be and therefore can be efficiently and compactly filed away, generally in Room 8 of the Archives Complex (see Figures 12.15 and 12.16). It was also possible at Pylos to trace how scribes interacted with one another, directly within tablets and in regard to the information that they recorded. Besides the ‘women-worker’ tablets (series Aa, Ab, and Ad, discussed in §12.1.2.1.1), scribes interacted prominently in the sheep tablets (series Cn), the tablets that deal with allocation of bronze to bronze workers (series Jn) and the records of landholdings (E-series). Figure 12.25 shows the interaction between two scribes (Hand 21, the main scribe of palaeographical class ii, 90 and Hand 1, the chief scribe of the entire site) on a single tablet (Cn 599) of the Cn livestock series. Figs. 12.26 and 27 show how Hand 1 and Hand 21 respectively write the standard signs of the Linear B syllabary (arranged according to the template in Fig. 12.29). Note especially the very different shapes of sign *07 (di) and the placement of the ‘s’-shaped thumb on the right side of sign *52 (no). On Cn 599 ideograms in lines .1-.3 are male goats, .4-.6 female goats, and .7-.8 female pigs. On the tablet, Hand 21 wrote what is still there on lines .1-.7. He also originally wrote line .8 and the partially preserved line .9. Hand 1, whose ideogram for female pig is radically different from Hand 21’s, erased the original text of lines .8 and .9. He then wrote a new entry in line .8 and trimmed the tablet above line .1 and through the original line .9. He characteristically begins his line of text flush with the left hand side of the tablet. Hand 1 also added the missing preposition pa-ro, paro between and slightly above the fifth and sixth characters in line .1. The ear of Hand 21’s pig-ideogram is still visible at the right of what had been line .9. There are also traces there of the vertical strokes signifying ‘one’. Palaima also went back, and with Bennett’s help, reread all the excavation notebooks from Pylos for clues as to tablet locations. 91 This became the basis for the renewed concern shown now for more than two decades with the tablets as archaeological artifacts and with understanding texts in their archaeological contexts. 92 89 Scribes Pylos, 35-58. 90 Scribes Pylos, 80-86; on the definition of palaeographical classes, see note 36. 91 Scribes Pylos, 135-169. 92 BENNET, D.J.L. 1983; BENNET, J. 1984; DRIESSEN 2000; FIRTH 2000-2001; PALAIMA – SHELMER- DINE 1984; PALAIMA – WRIGHT 1985; Pylos Comes Alive.
Page 1 and 2: BIBLIOTHÈQUE DES CAHIERS DE L'INST
Page 3 and 4: SUMMARY CHAPTER 12 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL
Page 5 and 6: §12.1.1 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND
Page 9 and 10: §12.1.1.1 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS A
Page 27 and 28: §12.1.2.1.1 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS
Page 47: §12.1.2.3 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS A
Page 65 and 66: §12.2 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND P
Page 97 and 98: §12.3 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND P
Page 99 and 100:
§12.3 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND P
Page 101 and 102:
Page 103 and 104:
Page 105 and 106:
show all

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

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?