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

116 T.G. PALAIMA §12.2.4
tablets. 155 We have already seen, however, that there is considerable variation
within the categories of palm- and leaf-shaped records in size and in particular
details of shape. To some extent the categories blur and merge.
Once the Mycenaean script was developed — and the Linear B writing
system is remarkably stable in its sign repertories and principles of use throughout
its attested history — it then had to be taught to the number of people
required to keep the records deemed necessary by the individuals and power
groups who controlled, or at least heavily influenced, how Mycenaean society
itself developed and operated within different palatial territories.
Whoever the individuals were who wrote our extant tablets and whatever
status they had, it was necessary for them to acquire knowledge of the art of
writing. How was this accomplished? Here palaeography and hand identification
offer clues.
The instances wherein the styles of different scribal hands clearly fall into
groups or classes (the clustering of the hands of the Room of the Chariot Tablets
at Knossos; the close similarity of Khania Hand 115 and Knossos Hand 115;
the very close resemblance of Pylos Hands 1 and 2; the three distinctive palaeographical
classes of writing style from tablets dated to the destruction level
at Pylos) offer our best evidence for how scribes of this period would have been
trained. Such similarities clearly argue for training underneath senior masters
who would transmit thereby a consistent and fairly traditional style to apprentices
who were learning how to use the Linear B script.
Finally, how many persons besides the generously estimated 150 hands or
potential hands identifiable in all our extant tablets might have known, during
any generation, how to read and write in Linear B?
Any speculations here are complicated by the evidence that Linear B writing
could be used on ephemeral documents. The strongest argument for this is the
fact that the signs of the Linear B script maintain a curvilinear and complex style
throughout 200 years of use, instead of developing simple forms that would
have been easier to write, as they often are, repeatedly into moist clay surfaces.
This raises the possibility that the Linear B records, as we have them, served in
some ways as preliminary archives with information of longer term importance
being transferred to records done in ink upon parchment or papyrus.
That there has been some simplification in sign forms over time is clear if
we compare, as Driessen has conveniently done, the signs painted on inscribed
stirrup jars with their earlier RCT forms and then with the developed Pylos and
other mainland forms (see Figs. 12.47-49). Enough signs retain some of the
155 See PALMER 2008b, 61, fig. 2.1.