Mycenaean Greek

This article is about Achaean Greek. For the later dialect

used in Achaea and the Peloponnese, see Achaean Doric
Greek.
Mycenaean Greek is the most ancient attested form of
the written Greek language, used on the Greek mainland,
Crete and Cyprus in the 16th to 12th centuries BC, before
the hypothesised Dorian invasion which was often cited
as the terminus post quem for the coming of the Greek
language to Greece. The language is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script rst attested on Crete before the
14th century BC. Most instances of these inscriptions are
on clay tablets found in Knossos in central Crete, and 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.[2] The language is named
after Mycenae, one of the major centres of Mycenaean
Greece.
The tablets remained long undeciphered, and many languages were suggested for them, until Michael Ventris deciphered the script in 1952 and by a preponderance of
evidence demonstrated the language to be an early form
of Greek.
The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories.
No prose narrative survives, much less myth or poetry.
Still, much may be glimpsed from these records about
the people who produced them and about Mycenaean Inscription of Mycenaean Greek written in Linear B. ArchaeoGreece, the period before the so-called Greek Dark Ages. logical Museum of Mycenae.

panta (all);

Orthography

, ka-ko is khalkos (copper).

Consonant clusters must be dissolved orthographically, creating apparent vowels:

, po-to-ri-ne
is ptolin (classical polin, city ACC).

The Mycenaean language is preserved in Linear B writing, which consists of about 200 syllabic signs and logograms. Since Linear B was derived from Linear A, the
script of an undeciphered Minoan language probably unrelated to Greek, it does not reect fully the phonetics
of Mycenaean. In essence, a limited number of syllabic
signs must represent a much greater number of produced
syllables, better represented phonetically by the letters of
an alphabet. Orthographic simplications therefore had
to be made. The main ones are:[3]

R and L are not disambiguated:

, qa-si-re-u is
gasileus (classical basileus, king).
Initial aspiration is not indicated:
hniai (reins).

, a-ni-ja is

Length of vowels is not marked.

The consonant usually transcribed 'z' probably represents *dy, initial *y, *ky, *gy.[4]

There is no disambiguation for the Greek categories

,
of voice and aspiration, excepting dentals d, t:
e-ko may be either eg (I) or ekh (I have).

q- is a labio-velar k or g and in some names gh:[4]

, qo-u-ko-ro is goukoloi (classical boukoloi,
cowherds).

Any m and n before a consonant and any incidence

of syllable-nal l, m, n, r, s are omitted.
, pa-ta is
1

4
Initial s before a consonant is not written:
to-mo is stathmos (station, outpost).
Double consonants are not represented:
no-so is Knsos (classical Knossos).

GREEK FEATURES

, ta- 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.
, ko-

In addition to these spelling rules, signs are not polyphonic (more than one sound) but sometimes they are homophonic (a sound can be represented by more than one
sign), which are not true homophones but are overlapping values.[5] Long words may omit a middle or nal
sign.
For more details on this topic, see Linear B.

3 Morphology
Unlike later varieties of Greek, Mycenaean Greek probably had seven grammatical cases, the nominative, the
genitive, the accusative, the dative, the instrumental, the
locative, and the vocative. The instrumental and the locative had fallen out of use by Classical Greek, and in modern Greek, only the nominative, accusative, genitive and
vocative remain.[6]

Also unlike later varieties of Ancient Greek, the verbal

augment is almost entirely absent from Mycenaean
2 Phonology
Greek, with only one known exception,
, a-pe-doke (PY Fr 1184), although even this appears elsewhere
Mycenaean preserves some archaic Proto-Indo-European without the augment, as
, a-pu-do-ke (KN Od 681).
and Proto-Greek features not present in later Ancient Omission of the augment is also seen in Homer, where it
Greek.
is sometimes included and sometimes not.[7]
One archaic feature is the set of labiovelar consonants [,
k, k], written q. They split into /b, p, p/, /d, t, t/,
or /g k k/ in Ancient Greek depending on context and 4 Greek features
dialect.
Another set is the semivowels /j w/ and the glottal frica- Main article: Proto-Greek language
tive /h/ between vowels. All of these were lost in standard Attic Greek, but /w/ was preserved in some Greek
Mycenaean has already undergone the following sound
dialects and written as digamma or beta .
changes peculiar to the Greek language and therefore is
It is unclear how the sound transcribed as z was pro- considered to be Greek.[8]
nounced. It may have been a voiced or voiceless aricate
/dz/ or /ts/ (marked with asterisks in the table above). It
derives from [k], [], [d] and some initial [j], and was 4.1 Phonological changes
written as in the Greek alphabet. In Attic, it was pronounced [zd] in many cases, and as [z] in Modern Greek.
Initial and intervocalic *s has become /h/.
There were at least ve vowels /a e i o u/, which could be
both short and long.
Voiced aspirates have been devoiced.
As noted above, the syllabic Linear B script used to
record Mycenaean is extremely defective, distinguishing
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 /t/). Both /r/ and /l/ are written r.
The sound /h/ is written only when /a/ follows; otherwise
it is unwritten.

Syllabic liquids have become /ar,al/ or /or,ol/; syllabic nasals have become /a/ or /o/.
*kj and *tj have become /s/ before a vowel.
Initial *j has become /h/ or replaced by (exact
value unknown, possibly [dz]).

*gj and *dj have become .

Vowel and consonant length is not notated, and in most
circumstances the script is unable to notate a consonant
not followed by a vowel; in such cases, either an extra 4.2 Morphological changes
vowel is inserted (often echoing the quality of the following vowel), or the consonant is omitted. (See above
The use of -eus to produce agent nouns
for more details.) This means that determining the actual pronunciation of written words is often dicult, and
The third person singular ending -ei
makes use of a combination of the PIE etymology of a
The innitive ending -ein (contracted from -e-en)
word, its form in later Greek, and variations in spelling.

4.3

Lexical items

Uniquely Greek words, e.g.:

, wa-na-ka, *wanax (later Greek: ,

nax, lord)

, qa-si-re-u, *gasileus (later Greek: , basilus, king)

, ka-ko, *kalkos (later Greek: ,

chalkos, "bronze")

Greek forms of words known in other languages,

e.g.:

, e-ra-wo or
, e-rai-wo, *elaiwon
(later Greek: , laion, "olive oil")

, te-o, *teos (later Greek: , theos,

god)

, ti-ri-po, *tripos (later Greek: ,

tripous, tripod)

Corpus

Main article: Linear B Corpus

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.
If it is genuine, the Kafkania pebble, dated to the 17th
century BC, would be the oldest known Mycenean inscription, and hence the earliest preserved testimony of
the Greek language, but it is likely a hoax.[9]

See also
Mycenaean Greece
Greek language

Notes

[1] Nordho, Sebastian; Hammarstrm, Harald; Forkel,

Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). Mycenaean
Greek. Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
[2]

Chadwick, John (1976). The Mycenaean World.

Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-29037-6.

[3] Ventris and Chadwick (1973) pages 4248.

[4] Ventris and Chadwick (1973) page 389.
[5] Ventris & Chadwick (1973) page 390.

[6] Andrew Garrett, Convergence in the formation of IndoEuropean 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.
[7] Hooker 1980:62
[8] Ventris & Chadwick (1973) page 68.
[9] Thomas G. Palaima, OL Zh 1: QVOVSQVE TANDEM?"
Minos 37-38 (2002-2003), p. 373-85 full text

8 References
Chadwick, John (1958). The Decipherment of Linear B. Second edition (1990). Cambridge UP. ISBN
0-521-39830-4.
Chadwick, John (1976). The Mycenaean World.
Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-29037-6.
Ventris, Michael; Chadwick, John (1953). Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean
archives. Journal of Hellenic Studies 73: 84103.
doi:10.2307/628239. JSTOR 628239.
Ventris, Michael and Chadwick, John (1956). Documents in Mycenaean Greek. Second edition (1973).
Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-08558-6.
Bartonk, Antonin (2003). Handbuch des mykenischen Griechisch. Universittsverlag C. Winter.
ISBN 3-8253-1435-9.

9 Further reading
Easterling, P & Handley, C. Greek Scripts: An illustrated introduction. London: Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 2001. ISBN 0-902984-179

10 External links
Jeremy B. Rutter, Bibliography: The Linear B
Tablets and Mycenaean Social, Political, and Economic Organization
The writing of the Mycenaeans (contains an image
of the Kafkania pebble)
Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP)
Markos Gavalas, MYCENAEAN (Linear B) ENGLISH Dictionary (explorecrete.com)

10
Palaeolexicon, Word study tool of ancient languages
Studies in Mycenaean Inscriptions and Dialect, glossaries of individual Mycenaean terms, tablet, and series citations

EXTERNAL LINKS

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