Linear B Script

Linear B is a syllabary written left to right: each sign is a whole syllable, either a vowel alone or a consonant followed by a vowel. The core chart has five vowel columns, a e i o u, and twelve consonant rows. 𐀀 𐀁 𐀂 𐀃 𐀄 are a, e, i, o, u; 𐀅 𐀆 𐀇 𐀈 𐀉 da, de, di, do, du; 𐀊 𐀋 𐀍 𐀎 ja, je, jo, ju; 𐀏 𐀐 𐀑 𐀒 𐀓 ka to ku; 𐀔 𐀕 𐀖 𐀗 𐀘 ma to mu; 𐀙 𐀚 𐀛 𐀜 𐀝 na to nu; 𐀞 𐀟 𐀠 𐀡 𐀢 pa to pu; 𐀣 𐀤 𐀥 𐀦 qa, qe, qi, qo; 𐀨 𐀩 𐀪 𐀫 𐀬 ra to ru; 𐀭 𐀮 𐀯 𐀰 𐀱 sa to su; 𐀲 𐀳 𐀴 𐀵 𐀶 ta to tu; 𐀷 𐀸 𐀹 𐀺 wa, we, wi, wo; and 𐀼 𐀽 𐀿 za, ze, zo. The gaps in the grid are real: no sign for ji, qu, wu, zi or zu has ever turned up on a tablet.

The letters we transliterate with are conventions, and each sign covers more sounds than its label. The r row writes both r and l (𐀨𐀷𐀐𐀲 ra-wa-ke-ta is lāwāgetās, 'leader of the people'); the k, p and t rows make no difference between voiced, voiceless and aspirated stops, so 𐀏 ka can be ka, ga or kha, while only d has a row of its own; and the q row is for the labiovelar sounds kʷ and gʷ that classical Greek later turned into p, t or k (𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄 qa-si-re-u is the ancestor of basileus). Fourteen further signs carry a second value or a cluster: 𐁀 a2 (ha), 𐁁 a3 (ai), 𐁂 au, 𐁃 dwe, 𐁄 dwo, 𐁅 nwa, 𐁆 pu2 (phu), 𐁇 pte, 𐁈 ra2 (rya or lya), 𐁉 ra3 (rai), 𐁊 ro2 (ryo), 𐁋 ta2 (tya), 𐁌 twe and 𐁍 two. Fourteen more, 𐁐 𐁑 𐁒 𐁓 𐁔 𐁕 𐁖 𐁗 𐁘 𐁙 𐁚 𐁛 𐁜 𐁝, are cited only by number (*18, *19, *22, *34, *47, *49, *56, *63, *64, *79, *82, *83, *86, *89) because they are too rare for a sound value to be fixed.

The spelling rules follow from the syllable shapes. A consonant at the end of a word is dropped: wanax 'king' is 𐀷𐀙𐀏 wa-na-ka, and Diwei 'to Zeus' is 𐀇𐀸 di-we. A cluster of consonants is broken up with an echo vowel, so tripos 'tripod' is 𐀴𐀪𐀡 ti-ri-po, khrusos 'gold' 𐀓𐀬𐀰 ku-ru-so and Knossos 𐀒𐀜𐀰 ko-no-so, while an s, n, r or l standing before another consonant inside a word is simply left out, as in 𐀞𐀂𐀵 pa-i-to for Phaistos. Words are separated by a short upright bar 𐄀 or, less often, a dot 𐄁. The numbers in the Unicode names (B008 for 𐀀, B002 for 𐀫) are Emmett Bennett's sign numbers from the 1956 Wingspread convention, which Linear B scholars still cite.

Who wrote Linear B: the Mycenaean palaces, about 1450 to 1200 BC

Linear B was the bookkeeping script of the Mycenaean palaces of Greece and Crete in the Late Bronze Age. The oldest tablets, from the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos, belong to the second half of the 15th century BC; the youngest, from Pylos in Messenia, were written in the last months before that palace burned around 1200 BC. Tablets have also come from Mycenae, Tiryns, Thebes, Midea and Chania, and painted Linear B inscriptions label the stirrup jars that carried oil and wine between the palaces. The language is Mycenaean Greek, the earliest Greek anyone can read, some four or five centuries older than the Homeric poems.

Nobody meant the tablets to last. Scribes pressed the signs into damp clay with a stylus, on palm-leaf-shaped tablets for single entries and page-shaped ones for totals, kept them for a year's accounting and then recycled the clay. The fires that destroyed the palaces baked that final year's records hard, which is why about 6,000 documents survive (some 4,000 of them from Knossos and 1,000 from Pylos) and almost nothing else: no letters, no laws, no poetry. What they record is inventory and obligation: flocks of sheep counted by the hundred, rations of wheat and figs for women workers and their children, bronze weighed out to smiths, chariot wheels in store, offerings of oil and honey to Poseidon, Zeus, Hera and a 'Mistress Athana'.

The name is a modern label. Arthur Evans, who dug up the first tablets at Knossos in 1900, called the Cretan writing 'linear' to set it apart from the island's pictorial hieroglyphs, and separated an older Class A from a later Class B. Linear B was adapted from Linear A, the still undeciphered script of Minoan Crete, which is why some of its signs fit Greek sounds badly; Linear A, Cypro-Minoan and the later Cypriot syllabary have their own page, Linear A, Cypriot & Aegean Scripts. The Greeks of the classical age knew nothing of it: after the palaces fell, writing vanished from Greece for about four centuries until the alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenicians, the one in the Greek Letters collection.

Who deciphered Linear B: Kober, Ventris and the tripod tablet

For half a century the tablets could not be read, and Evans, convinced they were Minoan and not Greek, kept most of the Knossos texts unpublished until his death in 1941. The breakthrough came from method. Alice Kober, a classicist at Brooklyn College, showed in the 1940s that the same words appeared with different endings, her 'triplets', which proved the language was inflected and revealed which signs shared a consonant or a vowel. She died in 1950, aged 43, before she could finish.

Michael Ventris, an English architect who had been gripped by the tablets since hearing Evans speak when he was a schoolboy of 14, built on Kober's grid. In 1951 and 1952 he circulated 'Work Notes' arranging the signs by shared consonant and vowel, then tried the guess that a few words frequent at Knossos but absent at Pylos were Cretan place names: 𐀀𐀖𐀛𐀰 a-mi-ni-so Amnisos, 𐀒𐀜𐀰 ko-no-so Knossos, 𐀶𐀪𐀰 tu-ri-so Tylissos. The values this fixed rippled through the grid and turned other words into Greek, and on 1 July 1952 he announced on BBC radio that Linear B was Greek. John Chadwick, a Cambridge philologist, joined him; together they published 'Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives' in 1953 and the book Documents in Mycenaean Greek in 1956.

The proof came from a tablet Ventris had never seen. In 1952 Carl Blegen's team at Pylos unearthed a tablet (PY Ta 641) listing vessels, and in 1953 Blegen read its first line with Ventris's values: 𐀴𐀪𐀡𐀆 ti-ri-po-de, 'two tripods', followed by the ideogram of a three-legged cauldron 𐃠 and the numeral 𐄈 2. Further along, a word meaning 'four-eared' stood before a jar drawn with four handles, 'three-eared' before one with three, 'without ears' before one with none. After that the decipherment was accepted almost everywhere. Ventris died in a car crash in September 1956, aged 34, a few weeks before Documents appeared.

Linear B ideograms and Aegean numbers: what the tablets count

Most entries end with an ideogram, a picture-sign naming the thing counted, and then a number. 𐂀 man and 𐂁 woman head the personnel lists; livestock comes in pairs, ram 𐂇 and ewe 𐂆, he-goat 𐂉 and she-goat 𐂈, boar 𐂋 and sow 𐂊, bull 𐂍 and cow 𐂌, stallion 𐂅 and mare 𐂄, with the plain horse 𐂃 and the deer 𐂂 beside them. Produce has 𐂎 wheat, 𐂏 barley, 𐂐 olive, 𐂑 spice, 𐂒 cyperus, 𐂕 oil and 𐂖 wine; materials 𐂚 bronze, 𐂛 gold, 𐂝 wool, 𐂠 horn, 𐂧 cloth, 𐂪 garment and 𐂫 armour; the armoury and furniture lists 𐃃 helmet, 𐃆 spear, 𐃇 arrow, 𐃉 sword, 𐃘 dart, 𐃄 footstool, 𐃅 bathtub, 𐃌 a chariot with its wheels, 𐃍 a chariot, 𐃎 a bare chariot frame and 𐃏 a wheel.

Some 'ideograms' are abbreviations: 𐂓 kapo, 𐂔 kanako, 𐂘 arepa, 𐂙 meri, 𐂤 turo2 and 𐃒 dipte are monograms, syllabic signs stacked into one, standing for karpos 'fruit', knakos 'safflower', aleiphar 'ointment', meli 'honey', turos 'cheese' and diphthera 'hide'. Many others, 𐂗 𐂜 𐂞 𐂟 𐂡 and the rest shown only by number, count commodities nobody has identified; scholars write them with an asterisk, *132, *142, *150. The 29 vessel signs, 𐃞 𐃟 𐃠 𐃡 and on to 𐃺, draw the actual pot shapes of the palace storerooms, tripod cauldrons, amphorae, jugs, cups and bowls, which is exactly why the tripod tablet could be checked against its pictures.

The numbers are decimal and additive. A unit is a short upright stroke, and 𐄇 1 to 𐄏 9 just add strokes; a ten is a horizontal bar, 𐄐 10 to 𐄘 90; a hundred a circle, 𐄙 to 𐄡; a thousand a circle with four rays, 𐄢 to 𐄪; and ten thousand a rayed circle with a bar inside, 𐄫 10,000 to 𐄳 90,000. Unicode encodes every multiple as one character, so 1952 is 𐄢𐄡𐄔𐄈. There is no zero and no fraction; smaller amounts switch to the metric signs. Weights run from the talent 𐄷 (L, about 29 kg) down to 𐄸 M, a thirtieth of a talent, then 𐄹 N, 𐄺 P and 𐄻 Q; dry goods are measured in 𐄼 T, 𐄾 V and 𐄿 Z, liquids in 𐄽 S, 𐄾 V and 𐄿 Z, and the largest unit of each is never written because the commodity ideogram implies it. 𐄂 is the check mark the scribes ticked entries off with.

How to type Linear B: fonts, Unicode and 'translators'

Tap any sign above to copy it. Linear B has been in Unicode since version 4.0 in April 2003, in three blocks: Linear B Syllabary (U+10000 to U+1007F, 88 characters), Linear B Ideograms (U+10080 to U+100FF, 123) and Aegean Numbers (U+10100 to U+1013F, 57), the first blocks of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane. That position matters: each sign is a four-byte character, and old software that assumes one 16-bit unit per character can cut a sign in half, so test before you put one in a username or a filename.

Font support is the real obstacle. Windows 11 draws all three blocks through its Sans Serif Collection font; Windows 10, macOS, iOS and Android show empty boxes or question marks until a font is installed. The free Noto Sans Linear B from Google covers all 272 characters of the three blocks, and George Douros's Aegean font adds Linear A and Cypriot; install either and the whole page lights up. There is no standard keyboard layout. In Word, type the code and press Alt+X (10000 Alt+X gives 𐀀), or search 'Linear B' in your system's character picker.

An online Linear B translator is a transliterator: it spells a modern word by syllables and applies the scribes' rules, so Maria is 𐀔𐀪𐀊 ma-ri-ja and Alexandra 𐀀𐀩𐀏𐀭𐀅𐀨 a-re-ka-sa-da-ra, a name that actually occurs at Mycenae. For a Mycenaean word use a glossary, because the attested spellings are fixed: 𐀒𐀷 ko-wa 'girl', 𐀒𐀺 ko-wo 'boy', 𐀈𐀁𐀫 do-e-ro 'slave', 𐀂𐀦 i-qo 'horse', 𐀏𐀒 ka-ko 'bronze', 𐀁𐀨𐀺 e-ra-wo 'olive oil', 𐀕𐀪 me-ri 'honey', 𐀢𐀫 pu-ro 'Pylos', 𐀡𐀮𐀅𐀃 po-se-da-o 'Poseidon', 𐀁𐀨 e-ra 'Hera', 𐀀𐀲𐀙 𐀡𐀴𐀛𐀊 a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja 'Mistress Athana'.