Earliest attested form of the Greek language, from the 16th to the 12th century BC
This article is about the Greek language as spoken in the Late Bronze Age. For the later dialect used in Achaea and the Peloponnese, see Achaean Doric Greek.
Map of Greece as described in Homer's Iliad. The geographical data is believed to refer primarily to Bronze Age Greece, when Mycenaean Greek would have been spoken, and so can be used as an estimator of the range.
Mycenaean Greek is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, on the Greek mainland and Crete in Mycenaean Greece (16th to 12th centuries BC), before the hypothesised Dorian invasion, often cited as the terminus ad quem for the introduction of the Greek language to Greece.[citation needed] The language is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script first attested on Crete before the 14th century BC. Most inscriptions are on clay tablets found in Knossos, in central Crete, as well as in Pylos, in the southwest of the Peloponnese. Other tablets have been found at Mycenae itself, Tiryns and Thebes and at Chania, in Western Crete.[1] The language is named after Mycenae, one of the major centres of Mycenaean Greece.
The tablets long remained undeciphered, and many languages were suggested for them, until Michael Ventris, building on the extensive work of Alice Kober, deciphered the script in 1952.[2]
The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories. No prose narrative survives, much less myth or poetry.[citation needed] Still, much may be glimpsed from these records about the people who produced them and about Mycenaean Greece, the period before the so-called Greek Dark Ages.
Orthography
Inscription of Mycenaean Greek written in Linear B. Archaeological Museum of Mycenae.
The Mycenaean language is preserved in Linear B writing, which consists of about 200 syllabic characters and ideograms. Since Linear B was derived from Linear A, the script of an undeciphered Minoan language, the sounds of Mycenaean are not fully represented. A limited number of syllabic characters must represent a much greater number of syllables used in spoken speech: in particular, the Linear B script only fully represents open syllables (those ending in vowel sounds), where Mycenaean Greek frequently used closed syllables (those ending in consonants).
Contrasts of voice and aspiration were not marked for any consonants except the dentals d, t. For example, 𐀁𐀒, e-ko may be either egō ("I") or ekhō ("I have").
r and l are not distinguished: 𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄, qa-si-re-u is gʷasileus (classical βασιλεύςbasileús "king").
The rough breathing/h/ is generally not indicated: 𐀀𐀛𐀊, a-ni-ja is hāniai ("reins"). However, 𐁀, a2 is optionally used to indicate ha at word beginning.[4]
The consonants l, m, n, r, s are omitted at the end of a syllable or before another consonant (including word-initial s before a consonant): 𐀞𐀲, pa-ta is panta ("all"); 𐀏𐀒, ka-ko is khalkos ("copper"), 𐀲𐀵𐀗, ta-to-mo is σταθμόςstathmós ("station, outpost").
Double consonants are not represented: 𐀒𐀜𐀰, ko-no-so is Knōsos (classical Knossos).
Other consonant clusters are dissolved orthographically, creating apparent vowels: 𐀡𐀵𐀪𐀚, po-to-ri-ne is ptolin (Ancient Greek: πόλινpólin or πτόλινptólin, "city" accusative case ).
Length of vowels is not marked.
Certain characters can be used alternately: for example, 𐀀, a, can always be written wherever 𐁀, a2, can. However, these are not true homophones (characters with the same sound) because the correspondence does not necessarily work both ways: 𐁀, a2 cannot necessarily be used in place of 𐀀, a. For that reason, they are referred to as 'overlapping values': signs such as 𐁀, a2 are interpreted as special cases or 'restricted applications' of signs such as 𐀀, a, and their use as largely a matter of an individual scribe's preference.[5]
labialized velar consonants[ɡʷ,kʷ,kʷʰ], written ⟨q⟩.[6] In other ancient Greek varieties, labialized velars were replaced with labials /b,p,pʰ/, dentals /d,t,tʰ/, or velars /ɡkkʰ/, depending on the context and the dialect. For example, 𐀦𐀄𐀒𐀫, qo-u-ko-ro is gʷoukoloi (classical βουκόλοιboukóloi, "cowherds").
The semivowels /jw/. Both were lost in standard Attic Greek, although /w/ was preserved in some Greek dialects and written as digamma⟨ϝ⟩ or beta⟨β⟩.
The glottal fricative /h/ between vowels.
The consonant usually transcribed z probably represents *dy, initial *y, *ky, *gy.[6] It is uncertain how it was pronounced. It may have represented a pair of voiceless and voiced affricates /ts/ and /dz/ (marked with asterisks in the table above): /ts/ deriving from Pre-Greek clusters of a voiceless or voiceless aspirated velar stop + *y (*ky, *kʰy, *kʷy, kʷʰy) and corresponding to -ττ- or -σσ- in Greek varieties written in the Greek alphabet, and /dz/ deriving from Pre-Greek clusters of a voiced dental or velar stop + *y (*dy, *gy, *ɡʷy), or in certain instances from word-initial *y, and corresponding to ζ in the Greek alphabet.
There were at least five vowels /aeiou/, which could be both short and long.
As noted above, the syllabic Linear B script used to record Mycenaean is extremely defective and distinguishes only the semivowels⟨j w⟩; the sonorants⟨m n r⟩; the sibilant⟨s⟩; the stops⟨p t d k q z⟩; and (marginally) ⟨h⟩. Voiced, voiceless and aspirate occlusives are all written with the same symbols except that ⟨d⟩ stands for /d/ and ⟨t⟩ for both /t/ and /tʰ/). Both /r/ and /l/ are written ⟨r⟩; /h/ is unwritten unless followed by /a/.
The length of vowels and consonants is not notated. In most circumstances, the script is unable to notate a consonant not followed by a vowel. Either an extra vowel is inserted (often echoing the quality of the following vowel), or the consonant is omitted. (See above for more details.)
Thus, determining the actual pronunciation of written words is often difficult, and using a combination of the PIE etymology of a word, its form in later Greek and variations in spelling is necessary. Even so, for some words the pronunciation is not known exactly, especially when the meaning is unclear from context, or the word has no descendants in the later dialects.
The verbal augment is almost entirely absent from Mycenaean Greek with only one known exception, 𐀀𐀟𐀈𐀐, a-pe-do-ke (PY Fr 1184), but even that appears elsewhere without the augment, as 𐀀𐀢𐀈𐀐, a-pu-do-ke (KN Od 681). The augment is sometimes omitted in Homer.[8]
The corpus of Mycenaean-era Greek writing consists of some 6,000 tablets and potsherds in Linear B, from LMII to LHIIIB. No Linear B monuments or non-Linear B transliterations have yet been found.
The so-called Kafkania pebble has been claimed as the oldest known Mycenaean inscription, with a purported date to the 17th century BC. However, its authenticity is widely doubted, and most scholarly treatments of Linear B omit it from their corpora.[13][14][15]
The earliest generally-accepted date for a Linear B tablet belongs to the tablets from the 'Room of the Chariot Tablets' at Knossos, which are believed to date to the LM II-LM IIIA period, between the last half of the 15th century BCE and the earliest years of the 14th.[16]
Variations and possible dialects
While the Mycenaean dialect is relatively uniform at all the centres where it is found, there are also a few traces of dialectal variants:
i for e in the dative of consonant stems
a instead of o as the reflex of ṇ (e.g. pe-ma instead of pe-mo < *spermṇ)
the e/i variation in e.g. te-mi-ti-ja/ti-mi-ti-ja
Based on such variations, Ernst Risch (1966) postulated the existence of some dialects within Linear B.[17] The "Normal Mycenaean" would have been the standardized language of the tablets, and the "Special Mycenaean" represented some local vernacular dialect (or dialects) of the particular scribes producing the tablets.[18]
Thus, "a particular scribe, distinguished by his handwriting, reverted to the dialect of his everyday speech"[18] and used the variant forms, such as the examples above.
It follows that after the collapse of Mycenaean Greece, while the standardized Mycenaean language was no longer used, the particular local dialects reflecting local vernacular speech would have continued, eventually producing the various Greek dialects of the historic period.[18]
Such theories are also connected with the idea that the Mycenaean language constituted a type of a special koine representing the official language of the palace records and the ruling aristocracy. When the 'Mycenaean linguistic koine' fell into disuse after the fall of the palaces because the script was no longer used, the underlying dialects would have continued to develop in their own ways. That view was formulated by Antonin Bartonek.[19][20] Other linguists like Leonard Robert Palmer[21] and Yves Duhoux[de][22] also support this view of the 'Mycenaean linguistic koine'.[23] (The term 'Mycenaean koine' is also used by archaeologists to refer to the material culture of the region.) However, since the Linear B script does not indicate several possible dialectical features, such as the presence or absence of word-initial aspiration and the length of vowels, it is unsafe to extrapolate that Linear B texts were read as consistently as they were written.
The evidence for "Special Mycenaean" as a distinct dialect has, however, been challenged. Thompson argues that Risch's evidence does not meet the diagnostic criteria to reconstruct two dialects within Mycenaean.[24] In particular, more recent paleographical study, not available to Risch, shows that no individual scribe consistently writes "Special Mycenaean" forms.[25] This inconsistency makes the variation between "Normal Mycenaean" and "Special Mycenaean" unlikely to represent dialectical or sociolectical differences, as these would be expected to concentrate in individual speakers, which is not observed in the Linear B corpus.[citation needed]
Survival
While the use of Mycenaean Greek may have ceased with the fall of the Mycenaean civilization, some traces of it are found in the later Greek dialects. In particular, Arcadocypriot Greek is believed to be rather close to Mycenaean Greek. Arcadocypriot was an ancient Greek dialect spoken in Arcadia (central Peloponnese), and in Cyprus.
Ancient Pamphylian also shows some similarity to Arcadocypriot and to Mycenaean Greek.[26]
Related Research Articles
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy, southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.
Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 BC to 1450 BC. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It was succeeded by Linear B, which was used by the Mycenaeans to write an early form of Greek. It was discovered by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. No texts in Linear A have yet been deciphered. Evans named the script "Linear" because its characters consisted simply of lines inscribed in clay, in contrast to the more pictographic characters in Cretan hieroglyphs that were used during the same period.
Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of the Greek language. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries, the earliest known examples dating to around 1400 BC. It is adapted from the earlier Linear A, an undeciphered script potentially used for writing the Minoan language, as is the later Cypriot syllabary, which also recorded Greek. Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Kydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae, disappeared with the fall of Mycenaean civilization during the Late Bronze Age collapse. The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages, provides no evidence of the use of writing.
Michael George Francis Ventris, was an English architect, classicist and philologist who deciphered Linear B, the ancient Mycenaean Greek script. A student of languages, Ventris had pursued decipherment as a personal vocation since his adolescence. After creating a new field of study, Ventris died in a car crash a few weeks before the publication of Documents in Mycenaean Greek, written with John Chadwick.
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek, Dark Ages, the Archaic or Epic period, and the Classical period.
The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. It has been suggested that the script remained in use as late as the 1st century BC. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is thought to be descended from the Cypro-Minoan syllabary, itself a variant or derivative of Linear A. Most texts using the script are in the Arcadocypriot dialect of Greek, but also one bilingual inscription was found in Amathus.
The Proto-Greek language is the Indo-European language which was the last common ancestor of all varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean Greek, the subsequent ancient Greek dialects and, ultimately, Koine, Byzantine and Modern Greek. Proto-Greek speakers entered Greece sometime between 2200 and 1900BC, with the diversification into a southern and a northern group beginning by approximately 1700BC.
Ancient Greek in classical antiquity, before the development of the common Koine Greek of the Hellenistic period, was divided into several varieties.
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Ancient Greek phonology is the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of Ancient Greek. This article mostly deals with the pronunciation of the standard Attic dialect of the fifth century BC, used by Plato and other Classical Greek writers, and touches on other dialects spoken at the same time or earlier. The pronunciation of Ancient Greek is not known from direct observation, but determined from other types of evidence. Some details regarding the pronunciation of Attic Greek and other Ancient Greek dialects are unknown, but it is generally agreed that Attic Greek had certain features not present in English or Modern Greek, such as a three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; a distinction between single and double consonants and short and long vowels in most positions in a word; and a word accent that involved pitch.
Potnia is an Ancient Greek word for "Mistress, Lady" and a title of a goddess. The word was inherited by Classical Greek from Mycenean Greek with the same meaning and it was applied to several goddesses. A similar word is the title Despoina, "the mistress", which was given to the nameless chthonic goddess of the mysteries of Arcadian cult. She was later conflated with Kore (Persephone), "the maiden", the goddess of the Eleusinian Mysteries, in a life-death rebirth cycle which leads the neophyte from death into life and immortality. Karl Kerenyi identifies Kore with the nameless "Mistress of the labyrinth", who probably presided over the palace of Knossos in Minoan Crete.
Amnisos, also Amnissos and Amnisus, is the current but unattested name given to a Bronze Age settlement on the north shore of Crete that was used as a port to the palace city of Knossos. It appears in Greek literature and mythology from the earliest times, but its origin is far earlier, in prehistory. The historic settlement belonged to a civilization now called Minoan. Excavations at Amnissos in 1932 uncovered a villa that included the "House of the Lilies", which was named for the lily theme that was depicted in a wall fresco.
Alice Elizabeth Kober was an American classicist best known for her work on the decipherment of Linear B. Educated at Hunter College and Columbia University, Kober taught classics at Brooklyn College from 1930 until her death. In the 1940s, she published three major papers on the script, demonstrating evidence of inflection; her discovery allowed for the deduction of phonetic relationships between different signs without assigning them phonetic values, and would be a key step in the eventual decipherment of the script.
The Proto-Ionians are the hypothetical earliest speakers of the Ionic dialects of Ancient Greek, chiefly in the works of Jean Faucounau. The relation of Ionic to the other Greek dialects has been subject to some debate. It is mostly grouped with Arcadocypriot as opposed to Doric, reflecting two waves of migration into Greece following the Proto-Greek period, but sometimes also as separate from Arcadocypriot on equal footing with Doric, suggesting three distinct waves of migration.
Thomas G. Palaima is a Mycenologist, the Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor and the founding director of the university's Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) in the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin.
Emmett Leslie Bennett Jr. was an American classicist and philologist whose systematic catalog of its symbols led to the solution of reading Linear B, a 3,300-year-old syllabary used for writing Mycenaean Greek hundreds of years before the Greek alphabet was developed. Archaeologist Arthur Evans had discovered Linear B in 1900 during his excavations at Knossos on the Greek island of Crete and spent decades trying to comprehend its writings until his death in 1941. Bennett and Alice Kober cataloged the 80 symbols used in the script in his 1951 work The Pylos Tablets, which provided linguist John Chadwick and amateur scholar Michael Ventris with the vital clues needed to finally decipher Linear B in 1952.
Eritha was a Mycenaean priestess. She was a subject of the Mycenaean state of Pylos, in the southwestern Peloponnese, based at the cult site of Sphagianes, near the palatial centre of Pylos.
Lydia Baumbach was a South African classical scholar, known particularly for her work in the field of Mycenaean studies.
PY Ta 641, sometimes known as the Tripod Tablet, is a Mycenaean clay tablet inscribed in Linear B, currently displayed in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Discovered in the so-called "Archives Complex" of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Messenia in June 1952 by the American archaeologist Carl Blegen, it has been described as "probably the most famous tablet of Linear B".
↑ Andrew Garrett, "Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology", in Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, ed. Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research), 2006, p. 140, citing Ivo Hajnal, Studien zum mykenischen Kasussystem. Berlin, 1995, with the proviso that "the Mycenaean case system is still controversial in part".
↑ Helena Tomas (2017) "Linear B Script and Linear B Administrative System: Different Patterns in Their Development" in P. Steele (ed.)Understanding Relations Between Scripts: The Aegean Writing Systems, pp. 57–68, n.2
↑ Anna Judson (2020) The Undeciphered Signs of Linear B, n.513
↑ Driessen, Jan (2000). The Scribes of the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos: Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of a Linear B Deposit. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.
↑ RISCH, Ernst (1966), Les differences dialectales dans le mycenien. CCMS pp. 150–160
↑ Bartoněk, Antonín, Greek dialectology after the decipherment of Linear B. Studia Mycenaea: proceedings of the Mycenaean symposium, Brno, 1966. Bartoněk, Antonín (editor). Vyd. 1. Brno: Universita J.E. Purkyně, 1968, pp. [37]-51
↑ BARTONEK, A. 1966 'Mycenaean Koine reconsidered', Cambridge Colloquium on Mycenaean Studies' (CCMS) ed. by L. R. Palmer and John Chadwick, C.U.P. pp.95–103
↑ Palmer, L.R. (1980), The Greek Language, London.
↑ Duhoux, Y. (1985), ‘Mycénien et écriture grecque’, in A. Morpurgo Davies and Y. Duhoux (eds.), Linear B: A 1984 Survey (Louvain-La-Neuve): 7–74
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Palaima, Thomas G. (1988) "The development of the Mycenaean writing system." In Texts, tablets and scribes. Edited by J. P. Olivier and T. G. Palaima, 269–342. Suplementos a “Minos” 10. Salamanca, Spain: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
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Palaima, Tom (1988). The Scribes of Pylos. Rome.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
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