[1st Paragraph] A number of writing systems are witnessed to have been in use in Bronze Age Greece, having had as their cradle the island of Crete, situated in the middle of the Aegean sea at a crossroad between Europe, Egypt and the Levant. From a typological perspective, all these writing systems are syllabaries, meaning that each graphic sign represents a syllable (e.g. /pa/, /ri/, /e/) and is a phonological unit in the script. These syllabaries were also complemented with a set of logographic signs, depicting real-world referents and standing for words or concepts, not individual syllables. Crete first saw the rise of Cretan Hieroglyphic and the Linear A script: the former is understood to be a north/east Cretan phenomenon (with major find-spots at Knossos, Mallia and Petras) in use in the period ca. 1900-1700 BCE; the latter, with its original nucleus probably to be sought in central Crete (Phaistos), shows a much wider geographical distribution (across Crete, on the Aegean islands, some finds also in Asia Minor) as well as time-span, ca. 1800-1450. Both scripts are still undeciphered and are understood to encode the indigenous language(s) of Bronze Age Crete (on Linear A see esp. Schoep, 2002; Davis, 2014; Salgarella, in press; on Cretan Hieroglyphic see esp. Olivier and Godart, 1996; Ferrara, 2015; Decorte, 2017, 2018). The role played by Linear A, and the civilisation responsible for creating and making use of such writing – the so-called ‘Minoans’ in the literature – cannot be over-estimated, so much so that over time Linear A was taken as a template (mother-script) for the creation of another two writing systems: Linear B, used on Crete and Mainland Greece in the period ca. 1400-1190 BC; and Cypro-Minoan, developed on Cyprus and used in the period ca. 1600-1050 (on Linear B see esp.: Ventris and Chadwick, 1973; Palmer, 1963; Hooker, 1980; Bernabé and Luján, 2006; Duhoux and Morpurgo-Davies, 2008, 2011, 2014; Melena, 2014c; Del Freo and Perna, 2019; on Cypriot scripts see esp. Steele, 2013a-b, 2019). Both daughter-scripts render different languages from the template: Linear B was successfully deciphered in 1952 and proven to write an archaic form of Greek named ‘Mycenaean’, while Cypro-Minoan is still undeciphered and encodes a language which is yet to be fully understood. In this chapter, the focus is on Linear B, since, being the only system currently deciphered and of which we thus have a better appreciation, it gives us the most insights into its diachronic development (starting from the process of adaptation from Linear A) and the reconstruction of the orthographic conventions used to write Greek by means of such system back in the Bronze Age. For the purposes of this brief introduction, it needs stressing that the context of use of Linear B is restricted, as limited to the bookkeeping of bureaucratic transactions by palatial administrations: our evidence consists in inscribed clay tablets (and some vessels) which have been baked and thus preserved to us as a result of a number of firing episodes which took place at the end of the Bronze Age. Therefore, due to the economic nature of the evidence, Linear B texts show a highly formulaic structure.