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Scribes and their handnotes: The Linear B documents from Rooms 7–8 in The Mycenaean palace of Pylos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2024

John Evrenopoulos
John Evrenopoulos*
Affiliation:
Independent Scholar, Directorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, Athens, Greece
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper investigates the information that can be drawn from the Linear B tablets in Rooms 7–8 (Archives Complex) and their context, which advocate the ephemeral character of these documents. The morphological and syntactical traits of the various scribes, as well as the physical characteristics of the artifacts themselves, point to non-conventional organisation patterns. The lack of systematic arrangement at all levels of scribal production raises questions regarding the likelihood of having a storage area for tablets kept in the Archives Complex (AC) for an extended period, from several months to a year. Whether these rooms could cope with storing long term (from 2–3 months up to 1 year?) an ever-increasing number of written documents is now open to question. In all aspects, the Linear B documents and their spatially limited context present us with difficulties in accepting their categorisation as an official, archival, assemblage. Moreover, all the archaeological data point to a more temporary and slipshod corpus of tablets than previously thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 70 , December 2024 , pp. 26 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Cambridge Philological Society

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