Linear B
The earliest known script for writing Greek, used by the Mycenaean palace administrations
The Meaning of Linear B
Linear B was a syllabic writing system used across Mycenaean Greece and Crete from approximately 1450 to 1200 BCE. The script, inscribed on clay tablets, was employed exclusively for palace record-keeping: inventories of livestock, grain, olive oil, textiles, bronze, and offerings to the gods. The tablets were preserved accidentally when the palaces burned, baking the clay. After decades of failed attempts, the script was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris, a young English architect, who demonstrated that Linear B recorded an early form of Greek — pushing the history of the Greek language back by half a millennium. The decipherment revealed that Mycenaean Greeks worshipped gods already familiar from later mythology, including Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Ares, Hermes, Athena, and Dionysus. It also showed that the Mycenaean palace economy was highly centralised, with scribes tracking every detail of production and distribution. Linear B was derived from the still-undeciphered Linear A script of the Minoans, but the two recorded entirely different languages. When the palaces fell during the Bronze Age Collapse, Linear B fell out of use and Greece entered a period without writing that lasted until the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet around 800 BCE.
Parents
None recorded
Symbols
Fun Fact
Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B at the age of thirty and tragically died in a car accident just four years later
Words We Inherited
English words and phrases that trace back to this myth. See our full guide to English words from Greek mythology.
Explore Further
Mycenaean Culture
💭 conceptHistory
The Late Bronze Age Greek civilisation whose warrior aristocracy forms the historical basis of Homeric epic
Minoan Culture
💭 conceptHistory
The Bronze Age civilisation of Crete that preceded and profoundly influenced Greek mythology and religion
Theogony
💭 conceptLiterature
Hesiod's epic poem describing the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods
Nonnus
💭 conceptEpic poetry, Dionysus
Late antique poet who composed the Dionysiaca, the longest surviving epic poem from Greco-Roman antiquity
Bronze Age Collapse
💭 conceptHistory
The catastrophic disintegration of Mediterranean civilisations around 1200 BCE that reshaped the ancient world
Knossos
🏛 placePalace of Minos and the Labyrinth
Knossos was the vast Bronze Age palace complex in Crete — seat of King Minos and the mythological site of the Labyrinth.
Homer
💭 conceptEpic poetry, Troy, Odyssey
Legendary blind poet credited with composing the Iliad and the Odyssey
Hesiod
💭 conceptDidactic poetry, cosmogony
Boeotian poet who composed the Theogony and Works and Days in the archaic period
Pylos
🏛 placekingdom, Messenia
A Mycenaean palace-kingdom on the western coast of the Peloponnese, seat of the wise King Nestor in Homeric tradition.
Fasti
💭 conceptLiterature
Ovid's poetic calendar explaining the religious festivals and mythological origins of the Roman year
History
💭 conceptLanguage and scholarship
An English word for the study and record of past events, derived from the Greek historia meaning inquiry or investigation, first used by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE
Pausanias
💭 conceptTravel writing, topography
Second-century traveller whose Description of Greece preserves invaluable accounts of myths, monuments, and rituals