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

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.This paper is based on part of my PhD thesis, ‘The undeciphered signs of Linear B’, which is due to be submitted to the University of Cambridge in spring 2016, and has been supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/J500094/1), the British Federation of Women Graduates’ J. Barbara Northend Scholarship (2015-16), and the Cambridge Faculty of Classics’ Graduate Studies Fund