What 𐃱 means
It marks a vessel in an administrative record. Whether B218 is a cup or a vessel of another kind remains unclear: one scholarly gloss reads *218VAS as “cup,” but the exact form is unsettled.
Linear B adapted Crete’s earlier Linear A script to write Mycenaean Greek. The oldest surviving texts come from Knossos in the late 15th/early 14th century BCE; tablets continue into the mid-to-late 13th century BCE. This dates the script’s record, not B218 itself.
Why did scribes use a vessel sign?
To label goods in administrative records. Linear B ideograms—signs for things rather than sounds—let scribes identify a vessel without spelling its word.
Archival and technical; it identifies a good in a written account.
“Cup” is a scholarly gloss, not a settled vessel shape.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does 𐃱 show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type 𐃱
𐃱\100F1Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.