This item is important for a
couple of reasons. Firstly it
establishes the Mycenaean period in Greece Mediterranean .
This ‘empire’ had its capital
near Gibraltar in order to control traffic into the Mediterranean . It drew metals from the Americas high point
of the palace culture coincides with the era of maximum activity in the Americas
As posted earlier, such a culture
needed a written trade script. This
obviously is it.
Trade also drove the creation of
a Celtic script known as Ogam which is suitable for writing on bark and wood
boards.
The important take home is that:
1 Evidence
keeps drifting in support of the conjecture and is actually widening the
geographical scope.
2 The
Atlantean high point ran from 1600 BC through
1159 BC and Mycenae and Athens
and most other ancient foundations in the Eastern
Mediterranean became part of the Atlantean palace culture operated
primarily by European Celts.
It is actually startling just how
far-flung and well established this ‘empire’ was and it compares well to the
British Empire and was certainly on the same track when it collapsed in 1159
with the Hekla blast and tsunami.
Ancient Tablet Found: Oldest Readable Writing in Europe
Found at a site tied to myth, Greek tablet survived only by accident,
experts say.
Main Content
Names and numbers fill the back (pictured) of the tablet fragment,
found last summer in Greece
Photograph courtesy Christian Mundigler
Ker Than
Published March 30, 2011
Marks on a clay tablet fragment found in Greece are
the oldest known decipherable text in Europe ,
a new study says.
Considered "magical or mysterious" in its time, the writing
survives only because a trash heap caught fire some 3,500 years ago, according
to researchers.
Found in an olive grove in what's now the village of Iklaina
(map), the tablet was created by a Greek-speaking Mycenaean scribe between
1450 and 1350 B.C., archaeologists say.
The Mycenaeans—made legendary in part by Homer's Iliad, which
fictionalizes their war with Troy—dominated much of Greece from about 1600 B.C.
to 1100 B.C. (See "Is Troy True?
The Evidence Behind Movie Myth.")
So far, excavations at Iklaina have yielded evidence of an early
Mycenaean palace, giant terrace walls, murals, and a surprisingly advanced
drainage system, according to dig director Michael
Cosmopoulos.
But the tablet, found last summer, is the biggest surprise of the
multiyear project, Cosmopoulos said.
"According to what we knew, that tablet should not have been
there," the University
of Missouri-St. Louis
First, Mycenaean tablets weren't thought to have been created so early,
he said. Second, "until now tablets had been found only in a handful of
major palaces"—including the previous record holder, which was found among
palace ruins in what was the city of Mycenae
Although the Iklaina site boasted a palace during the early Mycenaean
period, by the time of the tablet, the settlement had been reduced to a
satellite of the city of Pylos
"This is a rare case where archaeology meets ancient texts and
Greek myths," Cosmopoulos said in a statement.
Tablet Preserved by Cooking
The markings on the tablet fragment—which is roughly 1 inch ( 2.5
centimeters) tall by 1.5 inches (4 centimeters) wide—are early examples of a
writing system known as Linear B.
Used for a very ancient form of Greek, Linear B consisted of about 87
signs, each representing one syllable. (Related: "New
Layer of Ancient Greek Writings Detected in Medieval Book.")
The Mycenaeans appear to have used Linear B to record only economic
matters of interest to the ruling elite. Fittingly, the markings on the front
of the Iklaina tablet appear to form a verb that relates to manufacturing, the
researchers say. The back lists names alongside numbers—probably a property
list.
Because these records tended to be saved for only a single fiscal year,
the clay wasn't made to last, said Cosmopoulos, whose work was funded in part
by the National Geographic Society's Committee
for Research and Exploration. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)
"Those tablets were not baked, only dried in the sun and [were],
therefore, very brittle. ... Basically someone back then threw the tablet in
the pit and then burned their garbage," he said. "This fire hardened
and preserved the tablet."
Not the Oldest Writing
While the Iklaina tablet is an example of the earliest writing system
in Europe, other writing is much older, explained Classics professor Thomas Palaima,
who wasn't involved in the study, which is to be published in the April issue
of the journal Proceedings of the Athens
For example, writings found in China ,
Mesopotamia, and Egypt
Linear B itself is thought to have descended from an older, still
undeciphered writing system known as Linear A. And archeologists think Linear A
is related to the older hieroglyph system used by the ancient Egyptians.
Magical, Mysterious Writing
Still, the Iklaina tablet is an "extraordinary find," said
Palaima, an expert in Mycenaean tablets and administration at the University of
Texas-Austin.
In addition to its sheer age, the artifact could provide insights about
how ancient Greek kingdoms were organized and administered, he added.
For example, archaeologists previously thought such tablets were
created and kept exclusively at major state capitals, or "palatial
centers," such as Pylos and Mycenae
Found in the ruins of a second-tier town, the Iklaina tablet could
indicate that literacy and bureaucracy during the late Mycenaean period were
less centralized than previously thought.
Palaima added that the ability to read and write was extremely
restricted during the Mycenaean period and was regarded by most people as
"magical or mysterious."
It would be some 400 to 600 years before the written word was
demystified in Greece
From Wikipedia we have the
following:
Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an
early form of Greek. It pre-dated the Greek alphabet by
several centuries (ca. 13th but perhaps as early as 17th century BC, see Kafkania pebble) and
seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaeancivilization.
Most clay tablets inscribed in Linear B were found in Knossos, Cydonia,[1] Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae.[2] The
succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages,
provides no evidence of the use of writing.
The script appears related to Linear A, an undeciphered
earlier script used for writing the Minoan language, and the later Cypriot syllabary,
which recorded Greek. Linear B consists of around 87 syllabic signs and a large
repertory of semantographic signs. These ideograms or "signifying"
signs stand for objects or commodities, but do not have phonetic value and are
never used as word signs in writing a sentence.
The application of Linear B seems to have been confined to
administrative contexts. In all the thousands of clay tablets, a relatively
small number of different "hands" have been detected: 45 in Pylos (west coast of
the Peloponnese, in
southern Greece) and 66
in Knossos(Crete).[3] From this
fact it could be thought that the script was used only by some sort of guild of
professional scribes who served the central palaces. Once the palaces were
destroyed, the script disappeared.
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