Linear B Ideogram B166

It marks a textile type, but not a securely named object. The safest reading is a Linear B ideogram for a textile, not a phonetic syllable. Its exact referent remains unsettled.

Linear B first appears at Knossos around 1450 BCE. The earliest Cretan occurrence of this textile sign is in the Room of the Chariot Tablets; related forms appear in later records at Knossos and at Pylos. Palace scribes paired ideograms with quantities to track goods, so B166 belongs to an inventory system.

Is B166 a textile sign or a garment?

The textile reading is secure; the garment reading is an interpretation. In tablet transcriptions, 166 names the sign, while 166+WE adds the Linear B syllable sign WE as a qualifier. In Crete, *166 appears in the Room of the Chariot Tablets; the +WE form belongs to later Knossos phases, while both forms occur at Pylos.

That qualifier also explains a scholarly reversal. Some older scholarship treated *166+WE as a variant of B167, the separate ideogram for an oxhide ingot. Later textile studies read it as a qualified form of B166. Some scholars identify the qualified textile as a finished garment or kilt; others leave the exact object open.

How do I type B166 without a font failure?

If your editor accepts hex input, enter 100AE. The exact keystroke depends on the operating system. In HTML, 𐂮 inserts this character in a UTF-8 document.

A box means the app's selected font cannot display this Linear B character. Try a font that supports the script.