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

§12.2.5 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND PALAEOGRAPHY 121
information that was likely to occur in these inscriptions. In such environments,
very similar to the illegible (to an outsider) scrawl written by physicians to
pharmacists, signs and words can be written in haste in full confidence that
their messages can be understood, or divined, by the parties who need to read
them. We might recall here our observations (with regard to Tn 316 above)
about the self-mnemonic aspects of many of our records.
The Linear B tablets in other regards offer evidence that work specialisation
was passed down from fathers and mothers to their sons and daughters. 158 Texts
of the Ak and Ap series at Knossos record women workers. These texts use the
abbreviation di and the word di-da-ka-re (didaskalei) to indicate that children
who are designated as daughters (abbreviation tu for tu-ka-te, thugater) are
‘under instruction’. It is then not difficult to imagine also that the actual children
of scribes (like the young tablet-makers who left their palm-prints on the
clay tablets) would be taught the art of writing as a skill for their eventual
expected service within the palatial system. They would thereby be acquiring
a firsthand knowledge of Linear B palaeography that we now acquire in our
own attempts to understand how the tablets were written and by whom.
§12.2.5. The social status of the Mycenaean scribes
Since the Linear B tablets do not give us the word for ‘scribe’ or any related
word connected with administration or record-keeping, and since no tablet has
a signature or an identifying seal-impression upon it, it has been debated, most
recently by John Bennet and Jan Driessen, what the status of the persons who
wrote the tablets was. 159
Given how important the recording of individual and collective responsibility
is in the Linear B records, this glaring absence of explicit references to those
who were responsible for making and keeping the written records is striking
and puzzling.
If the ‘scribes’ did not have prestige or high status as a group, we might
expect for them to be listed collectively or individually among groups or persons
who receive foodstuffs:
1. as ‘wage payments’ (like the ‘sawyers’, ‘wall-builders’, and ‘chief-carpenter’
on Pylos tablet Fn 7);
2. as basic survival-level rations (like the cloth and other women workers of
the Pylos Aa, Ab and Ad series);
158 HILLER 1988.
159 BENNET 2001; DRIESSEN 1994-95; cf. PALAIMA 2003b, 188.