The Mycenaean palaces of the last phases of the Late Bronze Age were productive centres focused on few, if flourishing, industries. One such industry was that of perfumed oil, especially in the centre at Pylos, Messenia. The productive process, recorded on tablets written in the Linear B script, is particularly terse. Moreover, some ingredients, recorded via logograms and monograms, remain undeciphered. Here we propose some new readings of these commodities, drawing comparisons from Linear A, one of the scripts used in Minoan Crete. The case studies presented here, and their interpretations, shed light on the level of attention paid by the palatial administrators to orthographic practices geared towards the clear and unambiguous rendering of logograms. This in turn reinforces the idea that the Linear B script, if unsuited to writing the complexities of the Greek language, was a functional tool to precise and explicit readings of commodities.
The paper discusses a group of six sealings from the Northeastern Building at Pylos written by scribe 29. Three of these record a single animal (sheep or goat), while a fourth lists WI, almost certainly an oxhide. In addition, five of the six contain the term o-pa, which I have argued elsewhere refers to an obligation to finish the items which accompany the term: putting the finishing touches to chariots, refurbishing armour and weapons, fattening animals for consumption, etc. The question then arises of what the term refers to, not only in the five sealings at Pylos, but also at Thebes on the sealing Wu 76, which records a cow being sent to the capital by one a-e-ri-qo, doubtless for consumption at a state-sponsored banquet, and on the tablet Uq 434, where a-e-ri-qo is again mentioned, here as supplying a single oxhide, possibly the hide of the same cow as is mentioned on the sealing, with the delivery described as u-po-o-pa ‘subject to o-pa’. There is no problem explaining the appearance of o-pa on the sealing: this refers to the fattening of the animal. We might have expected o-pa to have had the same reference on the tablet; but this encounters the difficulty that o-pa always refers elsewhere to the object being finished, whereas the object on the tablet is not an animal but a hide. I suggest that the solution to the problem may be that in the case of livestock the o-pa obligation was a ‘cradle to grave’ one: a responsibility to fatten the live animal and to tan its hide after its slaughter. Finally, I suggest that the appearance of o-pa on the Pylos sealings with both animals and a hide may have the same explanation.
This paper presents the decipherment of the new vocalic letter Y, previously misidentified as sign no. 2 e e due to their great formal proximity. After an epigraphic revision of the available corpus, the letter Y shows a clear tendency to rather represent a u-value in examples that allow for a reliable interpretation. This new reading helps to better explain a new Sidetic graffito from Egypt, resolves old problems in some cases, and provides new identifications. Unfortunately, other examples remain obscure for now. The u-vocalism of this letter also challenges our current understanding of the Sidetic inventory of vowels and semivowels, particularly regarding the closest signs nos. 5 u and 6 w. Their distribution is reviewed in general terms at the end, and a transcription is proposed for u and Y. In addition, this paper includes some important epigraphic revisions and an appendix with the Sidetic corpus revised according to the new reading proposals.
Il existe en lycien un processus harmonique fondee sur la distinction de lieu (anterieure/posterieure) des voyelles basses et impliquant les syllabes contigues de morphemes affixes les uns aux autres dans le cadre du mot grammatical; la direction progressive ou regressive de l’assimilation est gouvernee par des rapports de dominance entre morphemes dont la motivation est plausiblement prosodique.
This paper analyses all the Linear A documents, both administrative and non-administrative, recording the logogram AB 122 oliv (the olive tree Olea europaea) and its ligatured signs A518 and A587, thus producing the first systematic analysis of Linear A documents on the use of olives in Bronze Age Crete. Additionally, this paper crosschecks data on the geographical position and the chronology of the Linear A documents recording AB 122 oliv with archaeological data on the exploitation of olive plants in Bronze Age Crete. By doing so, it (i) adds a new angle on the potential connection between olives and the rise of palatial institutions, (ii) supports the inception of olive exploitation and systematic oil production in Neopalatial Crete, and (iii) confirms that central and south-eastern Crete were the core regions for olive production.
