Palaeography, administration, and scribal training: a case-study

Abstract

More than 60 years after Michael Ventris’ decipherment of Linear B, 14 of its syllabic signs remain ‘undeciphered’:1 despite many proposals to assign sound-values to these signs,2 none has yet been officially accepted. This paper is based on part of a study investigating new approaches to these undeciphered signs: as signs which cannot yet be read in the same way as the rest of the Linear B script, they provide an opportunity to explore ways in which studying individual signs without necessarily being able to read them – that is, through palaeographic analysis of their forms and their use by different scribes – can contribute towards our understanding of wider questions about the script and its context of use.