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

122 T.G. PALAIMA §12.2.5
3. as earned or due allotments of food, like those given out to a group of
women, two shepherds, and most likely six fullers and two ‘lyre-players’
recorded among other parties in the Av tablets of Hand 304 at Thebes (Av 100,
101 and 106); 160
or 4. as distributions of foods during festivals or other religious occasions (like
the officials with ‘religious’ associations on Pylos tablet Fn 50).
The absence of ‘scribes’ from these kinds of documents might be used to
argue minimally that the tablet-writers were not conceived of, or paid or
‘rewarded’, as a class within the Linear B records, but acquired a knowledge of
writing in regards to whatever duties (political, social, religious, military or economic)
they had within the palatial system and received recorded rewards from
the palatial centres in such other capacities and not as ‘tablet-writers’ per se.
One possibility, therefore, is that the scribes are relatively high-ranking officials
or persons of importance in various spheres of regional palatial culture.
If the activities of such persons were of enough regular interest to the palatial
centres, they might have been expected to learn the art of writing and recordkeeping
so that they could write down, report and preserve data needed to
manage their affairs. However, given the low number of identifiable tabletwriters
in the preserved records from the palatial centre at Pylos (about 33) and
the broad range of specific interests that the extant texts document, there are
no easy match ups of tablet-writers with official positions, with the exception
of the ko-re-te-re and po-ro-ko-re-te-re, officials appointed by the palatial centre
at Pylos to attend to its interests in the 16 districts into which the two main
provinces are divided. These officials are 32 in number.
The other possibility, which I think is on balance more likely, is that the
identified hands would be practical ‘record-makers’ who accompanied palatial
and/or regional officials, like the wanaks (‘king’), lawagetas (‘leader of the
lawos’), ko-re-te-re and po-ro-ko-re-te-re (palatially appointed regional officials,
as we have just now explained, who are literally ‘agents of satiety’ 161 ),
e-qe-ta (hek w etas, traditionally translated as the ‘followers’, who appear mainly
in contexts of mobilization of persons for military service) and various kinds
of inspectors, inventory-makers, or overseers. In this scenario the ‘tablet-writers’
would essentially ‘take dictation’ from other personages or officials and
would organize and keep track of complicated data by writing them down on
the tablets.
160 TOP I, 26-27, 32-32, 176-178.
161 PALAIMA 2008, 385.