Scribes as Editors: Tracking Changes in the Linear B Documents
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Authors
Judson, Anna P
Publication Date
2020-10-01Journal Title
American Journal of Archaeology
ISSN
0002-9114
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Volume
124
Issue
4
Pages
523-549
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Judson, A. P. (2020). Scribes as Editors: Tracking Changes in the Linear B Documents. American Journal of Archaeology, 124 (4), 523-549. https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.124.4.0523
Abstract
This paper presents an analysis of the edits that can be identified in the Linear B administrative documents from Mycenaean Greece. The edits are instances in which the writers of these documents (the Mycenaean scribes) can be seen to have made changes to their texts by erasing, rewriting, and/or adding signs, words, or whole entries. These edits do not only include correcting errors and updating information (as might be expected for these administrative documents); they also include 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 paper 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 more than the length of a yearly administrative cycle) they were not merely rough or preliminary texts over which relatively little care was taken, but active documents designed for ongoing use and consultation within Mycenaean palatial administrations.
Keywords
Mycenaean Greece, Linear B, writing, scribes, Bronze Age Aegean
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.124.4.0523
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/310940
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