The Decipherment of Linear B
by
by
We Are What We Write
The world changed decisively in or around 776 BCE. Arguably the most important cultural event of European history took place then somewhere in the Greek peninsula. No, it wasn’t the mere matter of the first Olympic Games - although that may be connected. It was the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet, from which all other alphabets are derived. It is arguably this act that promoted the creation of European literature. It shifted an entire culture from one grounded on anonymous bardic legends to one of cosmic story-telling, led of course by the great Homer.
Writing itself in one of its various forms - pictographic, syllabic and alphabetic - had existed for several millennia before that point, but not really a literature. The 8th century breakthrough was the transformation of the Greek written language from one used for public administration, accounting, military reporting, and royal histories to one of everyday affairs. Language had suddenly become literature. And the first things written about in the new script were the legends that had been passed down verbally in the form of song.
Linear B is one of the predecessor written languages to Homeric Greek. It was used in the Mycenaean civilisation in the late Bronze Age, perhaps as early as 1600 BCE. The Mycenaeans were in turn the successors to the Minoan culture, the first identifiable European civilisation, and adapted the Minoan writing system for use in primitive Greek. However until the mid-20th century, the fact that Linear B was a representation of Greek wasn’t even guessed at. Chadwick’s book is an homage to the young philologist who had the insight and professional skill to connect the linguistic dots which proved that Linear B was a form of Greek.
What is arguably more interesting in this academic saga, at least to me, is the cultural watershed created by the transition of Greek civilisation out of Linear B and similar scripts into an alphabetised system. Chadwick hints at the impact of the change when he says that this “writing changed much of the Greek way of life. not least its poetry.” My hypothesis, which I am entirely unable to support other than by deductive evidence, is that the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet had a dramatic effect on the way in which written language was used and the proliferation of its use within the population. I suggest that the later adoption of the Greek alphabet as a phonetic translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the Coptic language had similar effects.
Linear B had elements of all three forms of writing - ideograms like Chinese and ancient Egyptian, syllabic signs as in modern Japanese, and alphabetic components as in all European languages. Pictograms have the singular advantage of being entirely independent of pronunciation, and thus can accommodate diverse dialects while remaining intelligible among them. The disadvantage is that pictograms either limit vocabulary or require considerable skills of memory to use even in simple expression. Chinese children must learn something like 5000 pictograms to be fluent, for example.
Syllabic scripts have the opposite problem. They are tied tightly to pronunciation and therefore are difficult to use across spoken dialects. In addition, syllabic scripts become very complex if they are required to express the range of sounds possible in a language. English, for example has over 10,000 syllabic possibilities.
As with Chinese, it is clearly possible to cope with these inherent limitations of syllabic script in the creation of a literature. Nevertheless, I suggest that the use of a phonetic alphabet provides a compromise between pictographic and syllabic writing. An alphabet is relatively simple to learn, can accommodate a range of dialects, and need not define each phoneme uniquely.
The ‘simplification’ of Greek script from a ‘composite’ like Linear B, therefore, could have had significant benefit. Alphabetic script can mimic new vocabulary as it emerges, for example, and therefore include more and more non-official events. Eventually alphabetic writing can ‘capture’ bardic legends which had been purely verbal. Homer is the prime instance of this effect.
If I am in any way correct is this analysis, the process by which European literature was created is very different from that of non-alphabetic cultures. In a sense the development of an alphabetic literature is likely to be a more popular than a palace affair since it involves the written formulation of popular legend rather than the extension of official reporting.
But there is also another, less advantageous, consequence of alphabetic literature. Official non-alphabetic records are directed toward ensuring truth, either by preventing errors in memory or by creating fixed records, usually of amounts. In short, this form of writing is meant to combat lies.
On the other hand, alphabetic writing is primarily concerned with story-telling, not with the recording of amounts or events but with the documentation of tales. While there is little chance of an ancient palace administrator confusing his records of the grain in the royal warehouse with the actual grain, there is every possibility that those reading the Homeric narratives consider them to be about actual events.
The telling of tales is not lying. But as the world has experienced repeatedly, some tales expressed in popular alphabetic script tend to be given a privileged status. Like the Judaea-Christian scriptures, they are considered more real than existential reality. These written records don’t inhibit lies; rather they are claimed as establishing truth.
My thought, therefore, is that the very process by which Greek (and therefore European) writing developed has to a significant extent created what might be called the ‘epistemological problem.’ This includes the rather persistent European involvement in dogmatic religion and its anti-social consequences. Essentially, we Europeans tend to confuse our words with things. In perfecting the Semitic invention of alphabetic writing, the ancient Greeks started us on a road of self-deception as well as self-discovery.
Proving perhaps once again that there is no free lunch, especially when it comes to culture.
The world changed decisively in or around 776 BCE. Arguably the most important cultural event of European history took place then somewhere in the Greek peninsula. No, it wasn’t the mere matter of the first Olympic Games - although that may be connected. It was the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet, from which all other alphabets are derived. It is arguably this act that promoted the creation of European literature. It shifted an entire culture from one grounded on anonymous bardic legends to one of cosmic story-telling, led of course by the great Homer.
Writing itself in one of its various forms - pictographic, syllabic and alphabetic - had existed for several millennia before that point, but not really a literature. The 8th century breakthrough was the transformation of the Greek written language from one used for public administration, accounting, military reporting, and royal histories to one of everyday affairs. Language had suddenly become literature. And the first things written about in the new script were the legends that had been passed down verbally in the form of song.
Linear B is one of the predecessor written languages to Homeric Greek. It was used in the Mycenaean civilisation in the late Bronze Age, perhaps as early as 1600 BCE. The Mycenaeans were in turn the successors to the Minoan culture, the first identifiable European civilisation, and adapted the Minoan writing system for use in primitive Greek. However until the mid-20th century, the fact that Linear B was a representation of Greek wasn’t even guessed at. Chadwick’s book is an homage to the young philologist who had the insight and professional skill to connect the linguistic dots which proved that Linear B was a form of Greek.
What is arguably more interesting in this academic saga, at least to me, is the cultural watershed created by the transition of Greek civilisation out of Linear B and similar scripts into an alphabetised system. Chadwick hints at the impact of the change when he says that this “writing changed much of the Greek way of life. not least its poetry.” My hypothesis, which I am entirely unable to support other than by deductive evidence, is that the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet had a dramatic effect on the way in which written language was used and the proliferation of its use within the population. I suggest that the later adoption of the Greek alphabet as a phonetic translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the Coptic language had similar effects.
Linear B had elements of all three forms of writing - ideograms like Chinese and ancient Egyptian, syllabic signs as in modern Japanese, and alphabetic components as in all European languages. Pictograms have the singular advantage of being entirely independent of pronunciation, and thus can accommodate diverse dialects while remaining intelligible among them. The disadvantage is that pictograms either limit vocabulary or require considerable skills of memory to use even in simple expression. Chinese children must learn something like 5000 pictograms to be fluent, for example.
Syllabic scripts have the opposite problem. They are tied tightly to pronunciation and therefore are difficult to use across spoken dialects. In addition, syllabic scripts become very complex if they are required to express the range of sounds possible in a language. English, for example has over 10,000 syllabic possibilities.
As with Chinese, it is clearly possible to cope with these inherent limitations of syllabic script in the creation of a literature. Nevertheless, I suggest that the use of a phonetic alphabet provides a compromise between pictographic and syllabic writing. An alphabet is relatively simple to learn, can accommodate a range of dialects, and need not define each phoneme uniquely.
The ‘simplification’ of Greek script from a ‘composite’ like Linear B, therefore, could have had significant benefit. Alphabetic script can mimic new vocabulary as it emerges, for example, and therefore include more and more non-official events. Eventually alphabetic writing can ‘capture’ bardic legends which had been purely verbal. Homer is the prime instance of this effect.
If I am in any way correct is this analysis, the process by which European literature was created is very different from that of non-alphabetic cultures. In a sense the development of an alphabetic literature is likely to be a more popular than a palace affair since it involves the written formulation of popular legend rather than the extension of official reporting.
But there is also another, less advantageous, consequence of alphabetic literature. Official non-alphabetic records are directed toward ensuring truth, either by preventing errors in memory or by creating fixed records, usually of amounts. In short, this form of writing is meant to combat lies.
On the other hand, alphabetic writing is primarily concerned with story-telling, not with the recording of amounts or events but with the documentation of tales. While there is little chance of an ancient palace administrator confusing his records of the grain in the royal warehouse with the actual grain, there is every possibility that those reading the Homeric narratives consider them to be about actual events.
The telling of tales is not lying. But as the world has experienced repeatedly, some tales expressed in popular alphabetic script tend to be given a privileged status. Like the Judaea-Christian scriptures, they are considered more real than existential reality. These written records don’t inhibit lies; rather they are claimed as establishing truth.
My thought, therefore, is that the very process by which Greek (and therefore European) writing developed has to a significant extent created what might be called the ‘epistemological problem.’ This includes the rather persistent European involvement in dogmatic religion and its anti-social consequences. Essentially, we Europeans tend to confuse our words with things. In perfecting the Semitic invention of alphabetic writing, the ancient Greeks started us on a road of self-deception as well as self-discovery.
Proving perhaps once again that there is no free lunch, especially when it comes to culture.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ March 13, 2020
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