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

§12.2.4 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND PALAEOGRAPHY 115
in the history of Mycenaean society and culture when there was a critical need
for records, i.e., when existing pre-literate systems of control and management
of resources, work and exchange were no longer sufficient. 151
We say that the Mycenaeans adopted writing from the Minoans by adapting
Linear A so that the new script, Linear B, could represent Greek efficiently.
But that is just a manner of speaking. It is difficult to imagine how
recent illiterates in the first generation of the use of script could adjust it to
the peculiar features of their language. Much more likely, in my opinion, is
that tablet-writers who had used the Linear A script, who were what we conventionally
call ethnic Minoans and who spoke the language or languages that
were privileged within Minoan palatial culture, 152 adapted the Linear A sign
repertories to fit the language that would be thenceforth the main language
of written communication in the Mycenaean states. The earliest records that
we possess, the tablets from the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos, we
must remember, come from the destruction phase of the period when the
records were written. This leaves open the possibility that even within the
LM II into LM III A:1 phase, the features that we now know as typical of
Linear B were worked out and eventually fixed over a period of years, even
decades.
I have dealt elsewhere 153 with some of the differences in formatting and text
arrangement that in my opinion are not significant markers of the transition
from Minoan Linear A writing to Mycenaean Linear B writing. Features like
the fuller use of rule lines in Linear B and the clear separation of logograms
from the fuller syntactical groups of words represented by phonograms are
developments that could have taken place within Linear A, had the Minoan
culture ever seen the need to write on clay tablets the kinds of economic records
the Mycenaeans eventually wrote. 154
Tablet-writers in Linear B then would have had a reasonably long period
before the destruction that preserved our earliest tablets, those from the Room
of the Chariot Tablets, to arrive at what appears to be the set repertory of
document shapes: page-shaped tablets, clay labels, nodules and leaf-shaped
151
PALAIMA 1987b, 508. PALAIMA 1988, 273-278, offers a complete survey of alternative theories
as to when, where and why the Linear B script was created. See also PALAIMA 1990b for an
overview of writing and administration in the Aegean sphere.
152
DUHOUX 1998 and RENFREW 1998 address the language situation in Minoan Crete.
153
PALAIMA 1988.
154 For the features of Linear A tablets in their administrative contexts, see SCHOEP 2002. Schoep
discusses Linear A tablets with rule-lines on pp. 76-77. So far as we can tell, as in Linear B,
nowhere in Linear A are ideograms imbedded in the syntax of phonographically represented
word-groups. The reduced context of Linear A records tends to obscure this fact.