Tentative Translation of Knossos Tablet KN 686 E X 321 as “spinning a carpet”…

Tentative Translation of Knossos Tablet KN 686 E X 321 as  “spinning a carpet”... or something like that, a bit of a stretch no matter how you look at it.

Here is my tentative translation of this tablet (Click to ENLARGE):


But, as per my usual approach to Linear B translations, I would much rather make an attempt at it, however bizarre the translation may seem, because not to do so is simply to cop out, which I never do. Here is my translation of this truly recalcitrant tablet, a translation which does make sense IF you take it at its face value, since all of the words I have preselected meet my own needs to make sense of it. But all this of course, is a nice little exercise in tautology, as indeed are quite a number of translations of Linear B tablets, the presumed (yet plausible) texts of which are ambiguous at best. This problem of ambiguity plagues our attempts at deciphering or translating so many tablets for a number of obvious reasons, among which we count, as I have mentioned several times already in our blog,

1. A large number of Linear B syllabograms are ambiguous in and of themselves, as they must do service for more than one Greek alphabetic consonant + more than 1 Greek vowel. This tablet makes this all too painfully obvious.  TEKI is NOT teki but texnh&, omitting the “n”, a common practice in Linear B, while the Linear B K is equivalent to Greek x in this case. Instances of such glides abound in Linear B, and we must always be on our guard not to interpret Linear B syllabograms being literally what they look like. 

2. So many Linear B tablets are truncated, i.e. chopped off, on either or both the left and/or right that it we should practically count on this being the case, rather than vice versa, i.e. assuming that the tablet is complete, which is, more often than not, not the case.

3. Ideograms further complicate matters. What is the grammatical relationship between 1 or more ideograms with the other words on any tablet whatsoever? Since pretty much all ideograms are nouns, I mean by this, What is the case relationship between the ideogram(s) and the other word(s) on the tablet or fragment? This is no idle matter, and it must always be kept uppermost in mind when translating any tablet or fragment whatsoever; otherwise, the translation is likely to be false.
4. When a tablet or fragment (this one is definitely a fragment) ends with an ideogram, there may very well be followed by other ideograms or logograms. If we accept something like my translation as being even partially tenable, then there is no reason at all not to assume that, in this context, the logogram for “wool” may just follow the ideogram for “ram”, at least in the context of my tentative translation on this particular tablet alone, and nowhere else.

I could go on, but you get the point. I have raised these issues and others relevant to the same problem so many times in our blog that I feel I am beating a dead horse. But I must insist on raising them again and again, to make certain that would-be students of Linear B get the picture, so to speak.

Richard