Indo-European, Hellenic · Linear B
Mycenaean Greek
𐀷𐀙𐀏 wa-na-ka, “king (wanax)”
- Spoken
- c. 1450–1200 BC
- Where
- Southern Greece and Crete
Mycenaean Greek is the oldest form of Greek, written five hundred years before Homer. Nobody wrote poetry in it, or at least none survives. What we have are clay tablets listing sheep, chariot wheels, bronze, perfumed oil and the tripods in a palace store. They were meant to be thrown away. They survived only because the palaces burned, and the fires baked the clay. In 1952 an architect named Michael Ventris showed that the script hid Greek.
Where and when
The tablets come from palace centres: Knossos on Crete, and on the mainland Pylos, Mycenae, Thebes and Tiryns. Pylos, the palace of the legendary King Nestor, gave more than a thousand tablets in 1939, found on the very first day of digging there. Smaller groups come from Chania in western Crete and from mainland sites such as Midea.
Linear B was adapted from Linear A, the still-unread script of Minoan Crete, probably in the fifteenth century BC. Mycenaean scribes used it for bookkeeping only. The largest archives date from about 1400 BC at Knossos to about 1200 BC on the mainland. Many tablets were probably written in the final months before the palaces burned.
How it fell silent
Mycenaean Greek did not die out. It is Greek, and its descendants are spoken in Athens today. What died was its written form. Around 1200 BC the palaces were destroyed one after another, possibly by earthquakes, invasion, internal revolt or the collapse of trade networks. The palace bureaucracy that needed Linear B disappeared, and so did the scribes.
For about four centuries Greeks wrote nothing at all, the so-called Dark Age. When writing returned around 800 BC, it was a new alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians. The spoken language had changed by then into the Greek dialects of Homer's time, so the Mycenaean stage counts as dead in the way Old English is dead: transformed beyond recognition.
How it may have sounded
-
𐀷𐀙𐀏
wa-na-ka
Say it roughly WAH-nahks/wánaks/
“king, lord”
Read as wanax because the script drops final consonants; Homer's anax, without the w, shows the same word after the w-sound was lost.
-
𐀴𐀪𐀡
ti-ri-po
Say it roughly TREE-pohs/trípos/
“tripod (cauldron)”
A Pylos tablet shows this word next to a drawing of a three-legged cauldron, an early confirmation that Ventris's readings were right; the r and the final s are restored, not written.
-
𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄
qa-si-re-u
Say it roughly GWAH-see-leus/gʷasiléus/
“local chief, official”
The q- signs are thought to stand for labiovelars like gw or kw, sounds later Greek lost; this minor official's title became basileus, 'king'.
Your name, set in stone
Linear B writes only open syllables, so every consonant needs a vowel after it. L and r share signs, and final l, m, n, r and s are simply left out: 'Daniel' becomes da-ni-e.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B in 1952, was an architect, not a professional linguist.
- The tablets survived only because palace fires baked the clay; ordinary tablets were reused or thrown away.
- Poseidon and Dionysus already appear in Linear B, centuries before classical Greek religion.