The Five-Hundred Club: The Riddle of the Linear B Inscription
The eccentric and visionary Professor —————-, archeologist and often-spellbinding teacher of Greek History, was a major contributor, throughout the 1950s, to the knowledge we now possess of the Greek Bronze Age [ca. 1600-1100BC]
In 1955, the Professor, on a dig in the environs of the Mycenae Palace, unearthed what he believed to be a type of tholos tomb dating from the Late Helladic period [LH 1550-1060BC]. It was in this that he discovered the inscription which caused such a stir when his translation of it appeared in an issue of The Journal of Mycenaean Studies, in June 1956. Below, we reprint part of that article.
[Note: Linear B, the early Greek writing system referred to in the article, was adapted by the Mycenaeans from the earlier Minoan Linear A and was used primarily for keeping Palace records, especially trade invoices. The work of deciphering it was done between 1951 and 1953 by Ventris and Chadwick.]
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The writing is on the wall. It is located within the tholos itself, on the wall to the left of the entrance.
Clearly, it is written in Linear B and consists of syllabic signs of phonetic value intermingled with ideograms having only semantic/pictorial significance. I also detect elements of earlier Cretan hieroglyphs. As Linear B scholarship is still in its infancy, my interpretation perforce remains tentative; certainly, speculative. Taking each syllable and ideogram
in order, let us proceed.
First, a marking indicating – Life/determination/the (human) will?
Then, a noun phrase: the noun seems to represent a People/Race.
The attributive adjective clearly means “last”, but in what context?
The last survivors of mankind?
Next, a verb indicative of (mass) exodus? A wholesale leaving – but of what? There follows an ideogram. It is a semi-circle with marks incised within it. Could this represent the earth itself?
After that, a syllable that could be rendered in English by the adverb Please. It sounds almost like a plea. But a plea to do what? To remember. Remember what? A plea to remember something (an event?) that has already happened?
What follows is chilling.
It could be either a transitive/intransitive verb or a gerund; it could be in the active or the passive voice.
I translate it into English as: Blow up.
(A cosmic explosion?)
The verb seems to have an object – the very last marking of the message – but it is in the form of an ideogram.
The ideogram could be a direct object – blow up what? Or it could be an indirect object, rendering the verb itself possibly intransitive.
Be blown up by what?
That ideogram ends the message. What is it a picture of? To my eye, it looks like nothing less than – a rocket.
***
Later excavations concluded that the structure was not in fact a tholos tomb, but a warehouse in which had been stored the staples of Mycenaean trade – olive oil, wine, timber, copper, gold and tin. The mysterious inscription which the Professor first revealed to the world has now been deciphered with some certainty. It reads:
Will the last person
To leave the chamber
Please remember to blow out the candle
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