Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives

Abstract

With the fuller publication of the material found by Blegen at Ano Englianos in 1939 (The Pylos Tablets, Dr. Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., Princeton, 1951) and by Evans at Knossos in 1899–1904 (Scripta Minoa, Vol. II, ed. Sir John Myres, Oxford, 1952), it has at last been possible to undertake a systematic study of the Minoan–Mycenaean texts written in Linear Script B. Their decipherment is now the central problem in Aegean archaeology, accentuated by the discovery, in the summer of 1952, of many new tablets by Blegen at Pylos and by Wace at Mycenae.Evans believed that Linear B (first found in the L.M. II palace of Knossos, c. 1400 B.C., and thereafter the exclusive script of the Mainland down to the ‘Dorian invasion’) was an administrative revision of Linear A, designed to express the same ‘Aegean’ language; and that Minoan colonisation of the Mainland was responsible for its occurrence at Pylos, Tiryns, Thebes, and Eleusis.