Linear B Ideogram Vessel B228

It denotes a vessel or handled tool, but the object is disputed.

Its clearest attestation is PY Ta 709.1 at Pylos, a 13th century BCE clay tablet. The word written beside it, po-ro-e-ke-te-ri-ja, is glossed as “an instrument for drawing forth.” That placement makes a handled implement plausible, but it never names one English object.

The wider Linear B tradition appears at Knossos around 1450 BCE, adapting the older Linear A graphic tradition to write Mycenaean Greek. B228 comes from palace bookkeeping, not decoration.

Why did scribes use 𐃷?

It helped palace scribes inventory equipment and goods.

Linear B tablets are Bronze Age bookkeeping: inventories of commodities, offerings, and equipment. In that same Pylos inventory, B228 sits among vessels and implements connected with portable hearths. Its job was to tag an item for the ledger, not to spell a spoken syllable.

At Pylos, scribes told vessel types apart by proportion and details like handles, bases, and spouts, so a quick sketch could carry a precise inventory category even when the object's modern name stays uncertain.

Why is it called a vessel?

“Vessel” is a catalog label, not a settled translation.

Scholars file the sign as *228 VAS, vas being Latin for vessel. The Pylos tablet gives it a function-based name, while other vessel signs were named for water, feet, or handles; one study reads the implement as a fire pan. “Ladle” and “fire pan” each need a qualifier.

Related forms matter, but not as a simple family tree: Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A, and Linear B share graphic material, and Unicode describes the later Cypriot syllabary as related to Linear B and Cypro-Minoan. Comparable fire pans continued in Cyprus in the sixth–fourth centuries BCE — object history, not proof that B228 stayed a living sign.