Ancient civilizations-2

The Linear B texts

Insight into the social order on Crete after the conquest can be gleaned from the Linear B tablets found at Knossos, where Linear B had replaced Linear A by the 14th century Bc. The decipherment in 1952 of the Linear B tablets as Greek by Michael Ventris, working with John Chadwick, has been widely accepted. Still, there are some skeptics who reject it; and, while most of these believe that the language of the tablets will prove to be Greek when (in their view) it is correctly deciphered, a minority think it will not. At the same time, among philologists who do accept the Ventris decipherment, there are a few who regard the language of the tablets as a form of Greek with little or no relation to the Greek of later times, which, in this minority view, was introduced into the Mycenaean world by new peoples of Greek speech at the end of the Bronze Age. The tablets have many personal names and place-names but very little connected descriptive Greek, making them hard to read; nonetheless, they are of enormous potential value. Knossos seems to have been the only Cretan centre with a genuine archive recording income, palace issues of expensive equipment like chariots and bronze corselets, and outlays on gifts to the gods (some of whom were Greek, some traditional Cretan), mainly in the form of donations of oil and cloth. The Knossos records are valuable in allowing reconstruction of farming practices, the wool industry, and military defense, as well as in providing lists of personnel and places scattered around the countryside of Crete that owed or brought sheep and produce to the palace. The bureaucratic apparatus seems to have been well organized and extensive, whereas the rest of Crete in the 14th and 13th centuries, though rebuilt after the earlier disasters and the abandonment of the 15th century and prosperous, does not give evidence of the same degree of control and record keeping. How far the countryside was subservient to Knossos is not known.