This paper investigates the issue of orthographic variation in the Linear B writing system in order to explore ways in which studying a writing system’s orthographic conventions may shed light on the history of its development. Linear B was used in the palatial/administrative centres of Late Bronze Age Greece and Crete (c.1400–1200 B.C.E.) and records an early Greek dialect known as ‘Mycenaean’. The writing system’s structure and orthographic conventions permit flexibility in the spelling of particular phonological sequences: this paper discusses the varying orthographic representation of such sequences and shows that synchronic variation is common or even the norm in many cases. Investigating the factors which underlie this variation demonstrates the potential for a study of synchronic variation to illuminate a writing system’s diachronic development; it also underlines the importance of analysing the ways in which writers actually choose to use writing systems in order to fully understand their development.

A wide variety of edits can be identified in the Linear B administrative documents from Mycenaean Greece. The writers of these documents (the Mycenaean scribes) can be seen to have made changes to their texts by erasing, rewriting, or adding signs, words, or whole entries. The edits include not only correcting errors and updating information (as might be expected for these administrative documents) but also a wide variety of changes that affect the texts' presentation rather than their content, such as alterations to their layout, textual structure, and orthography, and even the forms of individual signs. By analyzing these edits and the motivations behind them, this article sheds light on the priorities of the Mycenaean scribes in creating and using their administrative documents and the choices they made in the process of doing so. The results demonstrate that despite these records' short-term nature (tablets were kept for no longer than a year) they were not merely rough or preliminary texts over which relatively little care was taken but were active documents designed for ongoing use and consultation within the Mycenaean palatial administrations' yearly administrative cycles. 1 introduction This article investigates the ways in which the writers of the Linear B tablets made changes to their documents, what these edits reveal about the scribes' choices and priorities in creating and using these administrative records, and the impact these findings have on our understanding of the role played by the tablets in the Mycenaean administrative systems. 2 These originally 1 This paper was written during a Research Fellowship in Classics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

No abstract

This article analyses orthographic variation in the Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean palace of Pylos. Despite the general consistency in spelling found in Linear B texts from all sites, variation was in certain cases both permissible and entirely normal, even within the work of a single writer. Examining the patterns of orthographic variation found in the texts from Pylos, along with the factors which may have influenced this variation, sheds light on how the Mycenaean scribes were taught to write and how they applied this training in the process of creating their documents.

No abstract