[ZULU]

But the Linear A wasn’t in Greek. They haven’t “broken” it yet. Absent a “Rosetta Stone” its unlikely they will.

Its my understanding the Linear B material really realtes soley to merchandise, business transactions, nothing that can be used for real historical documentation. I didn;t know they had found it at Pylos, but since that was a Mycenaean site, I guess its not surprising.

[Verginius Rufus]

Yes, Linear A texts are in a non-Greek language. I meant the characters used in the Linear B syllabary are clearly derived from the characters used in Linear A.

Sir Arthur Evans found a lot of Linear A and Linear B at Knossos, and invented the terms, and I believe the Knossos collection of Linear B texts is still the largest. Carl Blegen, an American archaeologist, started excavating at Pylos (home of Nestor according to Homer) in 1939 and found the archives with Linear B texts right away--fortunately because WWII and the Greek Civil War prevented more work at the site until about 1950. There have been some smaller batches of Linear B found at other places on the mainland.

[Verginius Rufus]

The examples of Linear B which have been found are mostly palace records--a lot of inventories, but including personal names and place names. A certain amount about the functioning of the palaces has been learned from the tablets, but no historical texts have been found--nothing confirming any of the figures mentioned by Homer as a ruler.

The number of Linear A texts is much smaller. According to John Chadwick's article on "pre-alphabetic scripts (Greece)" in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Linear A goes back to about 1800 B.C. (Chadwick helped Ventris in the decipherment of Linear B, but Ventris is given most of the credit.)