A Companion to Linear B: Mycenaean Greek Texts and Their World. Volume 3 (Bibliotheque Des Cahiers de Linguistique de Louvain (Bcll))

by Yves Duhoux

Linear B is the earliest form of writing used for Greek; it is a syllabic script which belongs to the second half of the Second Millennium BC and precedes the earliest alphabetic texts by at least four hundred years. The tablets written in this script offer crucial information about the Mycenaean Greeks and their time. But who wrote these documents? How can we read them, understand them and interpret them? What do they teach us about the history, economy, religion, society, geography, technology, language, etc. of the Mycenaean period? The Companion aims at answering these and other questions in a series of chapters written by a team of internationally recognized specialists in the subject, who not only summarize the results of current research but also try to explain the problems which arise from the study of the texts and the methods which can be used to solve them. No Mycenologist can currently cover with authority the whole field and the Companion is aimed both at the beginner who needs an introduction to this area and to advanced scholars (archaeologists, historians, classicists) who require an up-to-date account which can serve as a standard reference tool and highlight the remaining problems.

Paperback

First published October 31, 2008

About the author

Yves Duhoux is a classical philologist, linguist, and Mycenologist known for his work in Ancient Greek linguistics. He is an emeritus professor at the Université catholique de Louvain.

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty much what you'd expect and want to see in a book aiming to be a solid academic introduction to Linear B: a brief history of its decipherment, a guide to the conventions of the published literature, a couple of chapters providing various types of context, and—Duhoux's own chapter, and by far the longest—an anthology of some forty-four tablets, with good facsimile illustrations, transcriptions, and analysis, to give a real sense of what interacting with the matter actually looks like. Not all of the analysis is necessarily great (particularly when it comes to the relatively new Theban tablets), but that's not really the point—it doesn't exist to be an authoritative reference.
No, my only real complaint is that by the time you're invested enough in Linear B and Mycenaean Greek to have found your way to this book—an unassuming (but not inexpensive) entry in the reports of an obscure institute attached to a Belgian university not particularly known for the subject published by (and seemingly only available directly from) a tiny second-party press that mainly publishes in French—nothing in it will be new to you. If you're sequence-breaking it is a very good place to start, however, and there are two more books in this series—maybe they'll hold surprises.