Linear B Syllable B087 Twe

It records a twe-like syllable, not an object. Linear B wrote Mycenaean Greek, and 𐁌 supplies the /twe/-like sound inside a word. Its clearest attested use is o-da-twe-ta, an adjective for wheels “fitted with teeth”—the sign alone means neither “wheel” nor “tooth.”

The script served palace bookkeeping—inventories and accounts—so this is administrative spelling, not an emblem. It died out with the palaces; Michael Ventris deciphered it in 1952, and as of 2026 it survives only as a Unicode character and scholarly transcription.

Was 𐁌 inherited or invented?

Probably a Linear B creation, not a proven Linear A inheritance. Linear B was adapted from Linear A; the later Cypriot syllabary is a related Greek-writing tradition. For 𐁌, a possible Linear A AB87 link is unconfirmed, and its restricted distribution favours development inside Linear B.

The earliest generally accepted Linear B tablets come from Knossos in the latter half of the fifteenth century BCE. For B087's origins, the Knossos So-series gives o-da-twe-ta beside spellings that split the syllable into separate signs—a scribal workaround, not a single inventor.

Linear B normally wrote open syllables, so consonant clusters forced workarounds: complex signs like twe compressed a cluster into one sign, while the analytic spelling tu-we wrote it as two.