Linear B Syllable B026 Ru

It records the syllable ru — which can also be lu.

It is one building block inside a longer Mycenaean Greek spelling, never a translation by itself. Linear B writes open syllables, drops most final consonants, and splits clusters with a vowel sign, so spelled-out words never match later Greek letter for letter.

On the tablets it sits inside spellings like 𐀓𐀬𐀰 — ku-ru-so, 'gold' — which is where most people meet it.

Why was the ru sign made?

It belonged to palace bookkeeping, not a general alphabet.

The oldest tablets are the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos, dated variously to the end of the 15th or the beginning of the 14th century BCE; mainland archives like Pylos are mostly from the second half of the 13th century BCE. Most signs came from Linear A, the older Cretan script that is still undeciphered, reshaped for early Greek.

Its sound value was recovered in 1952, when Michael Ventris showed the tablets write Greek; the later Cypriot syllabary, which separates r and l, is what proved the r-series merges them. The tablets are accounts — goods, workers, rations — so ru spent its life inside inventories.