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

112 T.G. PALAIMA §12.2.3
Texas at Austin. They make their own clay tablets and use styluses of this kind
during a session that I call ‘They Wrote on Clay, and You Can, Too.’ And the
title always proves true. Even five-year-old children can use the blade-stylus
with ease and very accurately. This is because the finely pointed tapering blade
moves easily through moist clay.
The shape of the blade allows for maximum control when drawing curved
strokes into the clay surface of a tablet. It even allows the scribe to change the
direction of his next stroke to any point in a 360-degree rotation by easily rolling
the stylus between the two fingers that hold and control it. In my case, using
was believing. Mycenaean styluses could have been made readily from any
sturdy reed-like plant or straight twig or pencil-form pre-shaped piece of wood
(or even bone and ivory).
§12.2.3. What did the Mycenaean scribes deal with?
Once the work of specific individuals is identified, we can then discuss what
areas of social, political, economic or religious life they dealt with in their writing,
what the distinctive qualities — we might use the term ‘peculiarities’ in
the most literal sense — of their work were, and how they interacted with one
another.
Besides the basic word for ‘tablet-writer’ in Akkadian and Sumerian, there
are other terms that specify the kind of ‘writer’ that a cuneiform ‘tablet-writer’
is: 140 deaf writer, 141 field scribe (land-registrar, land-measurer), inscriber of
stone, judge’s scribe, mathematician, military scribe, scribe for labor groups,
scribe of the property of the temple, scribe of the naditu (i.e., cloistered)
women, scribe of (the omen series) Enuma Anu Enlil. In Hittite records, some
scribes were known as ‘wood-tablet scribe’. Generally, other cuneiform scribes
were known as ‘leather scribe’ and ‘papyrus scribe’. We can see that the method
of differentiation here sorted scribes into classes according to: (1) the range of
materials used, i.e., the media for writing: clay, papyrus, wax, leather (parchment),
stone; and (2) the main duties or spheres of record-keeping activity:
legal records and records pertaining to land plots and distribution of land,
military affairs, work groups, temple and sanctuary administration, religious
matters. It was also not unknown for scribes to hold titles that designated their
professional responsibilities, but did not explicitly refer to their skill as ‘tabletwriter’,
e.g. ka¬u ‘lamentation priest’.
140 For this discussion, see PEARCE 1995, 2272.
141 This term probably refers to a copyist who works directly from another text and, therefore,
does not receive the information for the tablet he is writing through dictation.