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’: despite many proposals to assign sound-values to these signs, 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 will focus in particular on the potential of palaeographic analysis (which is, naturally, the primary basis for the identification of scribal hands) to contribute towards reconstructions of the work of the Mycenaean scribes