Scribes as Editors: Tracking Changes in the Linear B Documents

Abstract

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.

The Tablet-Makers of Pylos: An Experimental Investigation Into the Production of Linear B Tablets

“… 7 The only instance where both shorter preliminary texts (mostly, but not entirely, palm-leaves) and page-shaped summary documents are certainly known is a group of landholding texts from Pylos: Hand (H) 41's Eb and Eo series were compiled in H1's En and Ep series, with both writers contributing to the related totalling Ed series (on the relationships between these series and the administrative process involved, see, e.g., Bennett 1956; Del Freo 2005, 88–93, 104, 108–10, 120–2, 131–5; Salgarella 2019; Judson 2020b, 538–9); see further below. The page-shaped tablet MY Ue 611, found in the ‘House of Sphinxes’, is a record either of the same delivery of vases represented by the sealings found in the doorway of the same house ( Wt 501–507), or of a similar delivery (Müller, Olivier and Pini 1998, 15–16; Sacconi 1999, 545–6; Shelmerdine 1999, 571–2; Panagiotopoulos 2014, 170–2).…”

Learning to Spell in Linear B: Orthography and Scribal Training in Mycenaean Pylos

“…140Of course, interactions with other writers or their texts and observation of their preferences will not always have led to scribes following those preferences. In the most extended example we have of one scribe interacting with another's work – H1's creation of summary landholding documents from H41's preliminary texts – H1 can be seen in many cases to be deliberately making different decisions from H41 about various aspects of text presentation, including orthography (see Salgarella (2019) 74–81; Judson (2020a) 538–9, 541).…”