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

126 T.G. PALAIMA §12.2.6
Was clay-tablet writing used far outside the orbits of the main palatial centres
which until now give us all of our documentation? If not, how was the
information from provincial districts and second-order centres gathered and
eventually processed in summary documents at the palatial centres? 170
How was the information in the central archives organized? How many
tablet-writers or officials had access to the records once they were stored?
What happened to the records from prior administrative periods? Who decided
whether and when texts could be destroyed? It is noteworthy that with a few,
probably accidental, exceptions, we do not possess any tablets from administrative
years prior to the ones that were underway when the buildings in which
they were kept were destroyed.
Lastly, we would like to know something more about the social standing of
Mycenaean tablet-writers.
Was a masterful scribe like Pylos Hand 1 an aristocrat who used writing to
discharge his responsibilities in overseeing so many areas that were important
for maintaining the power and prestige of the palatial centre and its authority
figures? Or was he simply a very skilled technical expert, well enough appreciated
by those in power, but never invited to sit at banquets with them as an
equal?
Were there ‘temple’ scribes specializing in religious matters that are so
prominent in the tablets; 171 and, if so, how would they have interacted with
palatial scribes?
The wanaks at Pylos has his own potter, fuller, and e-te-do-mo, entesdomos;
and the lawagetas, too, has a wheelwright and other personnel designated as
his. Would such high personages have their own scribes, too? 172
For all these questions there are relevant data in the corpus of inscriptions
and the specialized editions and studies of the texts that we now have or that
are now in preparation. Palaeography has opened up for us a world where we
can come into contact with human beings from the second millennium BC
and know them at what we can call, without exaggeration, an intimate level.
We have their fingerprints, their palmprints, and their ‘hands’. We can see in
the physical shapes of the tablets their handiwork, whether as full-fledged
scribes or as apprentices. We can see in their finished texts how cleverly they
used the art of writing and what solutions they devised to nearly intractable
problems of how to record certain kinds of information. In some cases, we have
170 PALAIMA 2000b; and PALAIMA 2001, especially for discussion of macro- and microeconomic
levels of administrative organization.
171 WEILHARTNER 2005.
172 See PALAIMA 2002.