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124 T.G. PALAIMA §12.2.6 §12.2.6. Some pending questions Many problems related to the Mycenaean scribes and their texts are still unsolved and await new perspectives or fresh minds concentrating on ‘the realities of the situation.’ For example, we might ask, did the Linear B scribes use soft, perishable writing materials (papyri, parchment, waxed tablets) and to what extent? Remember that the fluid, criss-crossing and curving lines of some of the more elaborate signs suggest that writing with ink on ephemeral materials was practiced, as it clearly was in the Minoan period on ‘packet’ sealings, or, as Hallager calls them, ‘flat-based nodules’ (Fig. 12.51). Fig. 12.51. Flat-based nodules used to secure the integrity of messages written on folded parchment (after HALLAGER 1996, 140, fig. 51) We have hypothesized that Minoan scribes most likely invented and first taught the art of writing. Who were their pupils? Could we imagine that Minoan scribes were in charge at the beginning of the Mycenaean administration in Crete and that the knowledge and use of script was transmitted from fathers to sons or nephews within their family lines? That is, was there a tendency toward the hereditary transmission of the scribal function, parallel to how craft skills in other areas like pottery production and cloth manufacture are passed to sons and daughters? Might this mean that the professional skill of writing always stayed within extended families who were of Minoan ‘ethnicity’ in origin? 167 167 This might be useful in explaining why the language of the Linear B tablets is so uniform, despite being attested over a period of almost two centuries and in regions where, in the alphabetic period, remarkably different dialects prevailed. Essentially the language of the tablets would be a somewhat fossilized Greek that was used to record basic information. It might also explain the willingness of the tablet-writers to perpetuate old ideograms that derive seemingly from the initial syllables of Minoan words.
§12.2.6 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND PALAEOGRAPHY 125 How long was the apprenticeship period? What was the curriculum for education in the art of writing? We might even ask how many scribes had to be trained at any one time. Kevin Pluta in his dissertation in progress 168 calculates that the Palace of Nestor would have had to train just three scribes per year to maintain a stable ‘scribal workforce’. He supposes that the floruit of a tablet-writer at Pylos, i.e., the period of his most active and accomplished use of writing for administrative purposes, was only ten years (surely a conservative estimate), and that the number of tablet-writers active at any one time did not far exceed the approximately 30 scribes that we have identified in the tablets preserved by the late LH III B destruction. Let us, in order to be very conservative in our hypothesizing, double the number of tablet-writers needed by the palatial centre at any one time and use a moderate estimate for the average working career of a scribe of fifteen years. Then in any given year, in order to maintain the number of skilled tabletwriters the palace administration needed, a mere four scribes would have to ‘get their diplomas’. This may explain why we find little evidence for scribal schools. Scribal education might have been a matter of apprenticeship of sons within the families of current scribes, or the younger males within their extended clans or village-level communities. This kind of hypothesizing raises still more questions. How was the knowledge of script transmitted outward from the site where it was invented to the other centres? By the end of the Mycenaean III B period, we have clear evidence that writing was used for wide-ranging purposes, for example, 1. daily distributions of barley to individuals and work groups (e.g., the Thebes Fq tablets); 2. inventories of vases (Mycenae Ue 611; Pylos Tn 996 and the Ta series); 3. making sure that military equipment, vital for the defense of territories or expansion of power, was ready (Pylos Sa and Sh tablets; 169 Tiryns Si tablets; Thebes Ug tablets; Khania Sq 1; the many KN S- series); 4. offerings or the consignment of goods, materials and artefacts to sanctuary localities (KN Fp series; PY Fr series; PY Tn 316; KH Gq 5); 5. the highest matters of religious ceremony (Pylos Un 718, Tn 316 and the Ta series; Khania Gq 5). 168 PLUTA forthcoming. 169 See also the joins of tablet fragments that indicate other military equipment manufacture at Pylos: MELENA 1996-97, 165-170.
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