Archaeology and Science annual: the Decipherment of Supersyllabograms in Linear B, the last & most formidable frontier in the decipherment of Mycenaean Linear B

Archaeology and Science annual: the Decipherment of Supersyllabograms in Linear B, the last & most formidable frontier in the decipherment of Mycenaean Linear B:

For the past 65 years since Michael Ventris first deciphered Linear B, one phenomenon has eluded historical linguists and philologists. This is the supersyllabogram, which is always a single syllabogram, being the first syllabogram, i.e. the first syllable of a particular Mycenaean word in any one or more of the major economic sectors of the Mycenaean economy: agriculture, military, textiles and the vessels and pottery sector, along with a few religious supersyllabograms. Supersyllabograms are always independent; they always stand alone on extant Linear. My discovery, isolation and classification of supersyllabograms represents the final frontier in the decipherment of Mycenaean Linear B. Some 800 tablets from Knossos alone contain primarily supersyllabograms, with a subset of these incised with supersyllabograms and nothing else. It is difficult to decipher the former, and impossible to decipher the latter without fully accounting for the presence of supersyllabograms. The decipherment of supersyllabograms accounts for the last and most difficult remaining 10 % of Mycenaean Linear B to be deciphered.

You may also download “The Decipherment of Supersyllabograms in Linear B” here:

This article is 35 pages long (pp. 73-108) in a 29 cm. x 22 cm. format, which is far oversized compared with the standard north American format for research journals (ca. 20 cm. vertical), meaning that if it had been published in the standard north American format, it would have run to some 50 pp., which is the size of a small book.

The Editorial Board consists of 21 peer reviewers, all of them matriculated professors and researchers at the Ph.D. level or higher, from Ancona, Belgrade, Belgium, Bologna, Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A., Moscow, Münich, Philadelphia, U.S.A., Rome, Warsaw & Trieste. Every author must pass muster with the majority of these peer reviewers if his or her article is to be published in Archaeology and Science. That is one tall hurdle to overcome.

Note also that I am ranked in the top 0.5 % of all researchers and publishers on academia.edu

 

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TOTAL no. of followers of KO NO SO & Rita Roberts on Twitter = 2,653

TOTAL no. of followers of KO NO SO & Rita Roberts on Twitter = 2,653







In just 1 month, the number of followers to my twitter account KO NO SO has risen from just over 1,900 to 2,025, while Rita Roberts now has 628 followers, yielding a total of 2,653 for both of our twitter accounts. I have posted 17.2 K tweets on KO NO SO, while Rita Roberts has 18.2 K tweets.  This is explosive growth for a diachronic linguistics twitter site as esoteric as KO NO SO, which deals with the rare syllabaries, Minoan Linear A, Mycenaean Linear B and Arcado-Cypriot Linear C. 

Imagine my utter astonishment when I just now revisited a rare Minoan Linear A tablet from Malia, and deduced that it may be written in proto-Greek!

Imagine my utter astonishment when I just now revisited a rare Minoan Linear A tablet from Malia, and deduced that it may be written in proto-Greek!

And here it is, complete with a fairly complete decipherment, except for the word puwi, which utterly escapes me:



As I have just pointed out in the illustration of this tablet above, the implication for the eventual (all but complete?) decipherment of Minoan Linear A are nothing short of staggering ! The first time I attempted to decipher this tablet, I got absolutely nowhere, but this time round the story is quite different.

Compare the decipherment of this rare Minoan Linear A tablet with my decipherment of a Minoan Linear A medallion, on which is inscribed what appears to be the Linear A ideogram for “man”, but in fact is not.



I have explained this in some detail in the preview of my article, “The Mycenaean Linear B “Rosetta Stone” to Minoan Linear A Tablet HT 31 (Haghia Triada) Vessels and Pottery”, to be published in Vol. 12 (2016) of the prestigious international journal, Archaeology and Science (Belgrade) ISSN 1452-7448 (the article being currently under wraps until it is eventually published, probably early in 2018), and which will run to at least 50 pages.  

The British Museum on Twitter only follows back about 5 % of those who follow them, but they do follow us!

The British Museum on Twitter only follows back about 5 % of those who follow them, but they do follow us! 



While The British Museum has 1.01 million followers, they only follow back 50.9 K Twitter accounts, and KONOSO is one of those with whom they reciprocate. In other words, we are among the 5 % of Twitter accounts they follow back. This goes to demonstrate the enormous impact our Twitter account, KONOSO:



Moreover, in the past 3 months alone, the number of our twitter followers has risen from 1,600 to over 1,900 (1902). This, in combination with the 625 followers of our co-researcher colleague's twitter account (Rita Roberts):



brings the total number of followers of our 2 accounts combined to 2,527, up from less than 2,000 only 3 months ago.
 
Among other prestigious international Twitter accounts following us we find:

Henry George Liddell:



the latest in a long line of generations of great historical Greek linguists who over the centuries have compiled the world’s greatest classical Greek dictionary, the Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon.

Phaistos Project:



Greek History Podcast:



@antiquitas @eterna:



Dr Kalliopi Nikita:



Expert in Greek Archaeology-Ancient Glass Specialist-Dedicated to Greek Culture, Language & Heritage Awareness Art lover-Theatrophile-Painter- Olympiacos-Sphinx 

The Nicholson Museum, antiquities and archaeology museum, Sydney University Museums, Sydney, Australia, also follows us:



Eonomastica:


Bacher Archäology (Institute, Vienna):



Canadian Archaeology:



University of Alberta = UofAHistory&Classics (Alberta, Canada):
 


All of our followers confirm that Minoan Linear A, Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae:



is having a profound impact on the vast field of diachronic historical linguistics, especially the decipherment of ancient languages, most notably Mycenaean Linear B, Arcado-Cypriot Linear C and even Minoan Linear A.  MLALBK&M has in effect become the premier diachronic historical linguistics site of its kind in the world in the space of less than 4 years. 

An idea of how many impressions (tweets & retweets) a day my Twitter account, Konoso, gets = 6,552 today alone!… correction 7,114. I cannot keep up!

An idea of how many impressions (tweets & retweets) a day my Twitter account, Konoso, gets = 6,552 today alone!

Click to visit & FOLLOW if you like!




The snapshot of my Twitter account, Konoso, informs us that it has had 6,552 impressions (tweets & retweets) in the past 24 hours alone. This number varies daily from a low of about 1,200 to highs in around 6,500, as seen here. Busy Twitter account for something as esoteric as Minoan Linear A & Mycenaean Linear B, n’est-ce pas? These are at least my impressions, though certainly not all of them (pun!) 

UPDATE on the military Minoan Linear A tablet HT 94 (Haghia Triada) = attendants to the king/foot soldiers

UPDATE on the military Minoan Linear A tablet HT 94 (Haghia Triada) = attendants to the king/foot soldiers: 



This tablet, HT 94 (Haghia Triada) contains the key military Minoan Linear A term, kapa, which is almost certainly the approximate equivalent to Mycenaean Linear B eqeta = “follower”.



The term eqeta in Mycenaean Greek has a special connotation. It denotes an attendant to the king, wanaka, who is usually also the rawaketa = “leader of the hosts” i.e.  “Commander-in-Chief”, which in the case of the Mycenaean expedition against Troy (ca. 1300-1250 BCE) would have been Agamemnon.



It is notable that the ideogram, apparently for “man”, on the medallion is so large that it practically fills the entire surface. Note also the supersyllabogram KA which is surcharged top right. This medallion is not the Linear A tablet HT 94 (Haghia Triada), but its resemblance to the text of the latter is so striking it simply cannot be ignored. In addition, this ideogram is more elaborate than the standard one for “man” in Minoan Linear A, and bears an amazing resemblance to the fresco image of the eqeta above. For these two reasons alone, I have come to the firm conclusion that indeed kapa in Minoan Linear A is the close equivalent to eqeta in Mycenaean Linear B, with a scalar precision of 75 % or >.      

According to the renowned twentieth century Linear B expert and researcher, L.R. Palmer, the eqeta also appears to have had a religious function.

It is highly unlikely there was such a person as a “follower” in pre-Mycenaean, Minoan society at Knossos. So we must take a stab at an approximation to the term eqeta in Minoan Linear A, i.e. kapa, which would probably have referred to attendants to the King, much in the same way as the Praetorian Guards who protected the sacrosanct person of the Emperor in post AD ancient Rome. 

Mycenaean palace administrative hierarchy (POST 1,300)

Mycenaean palace administrative hierarchy (POST 1,300):



Although we will never know the exact details of the Mycenaean palace administrative hierarchy, the table above gives us a pretty good idea of the power-base hierarchy from the King or wanax on down to the higher administrative officials, the mid-level officers and lower-level administrators, followed by the subaltern freemen, craftsmen and farmers and finally by the slaves. The names of each of the positions top-down follow in Latinized Linear B:



1. wanaka = King. The official residence of the King, or the Palace was called the wanakatero.
2. rawaketa = Leader of the Host, i.e. Commander-in-Chief. Sometimes, as in the case of Agamemnon, the General who lead the host (i.e. the army) into the Trojan War, the King and Commander-in-Chief are the selfsame person.
3. qasireu = prince potentate (slightly below the wanax & the rawaketa in the power hierarchy.
4. eqeta = the followers, professional foot soldiers and the personal guard of the wanax and the rawaketa. Cf. the Praetorian Guards of the Roman emperors.
5. teretai = aristocrats, called aristoi = the best people in later ancient Greek. These are the wealthy, upper class people protected by the wanax and rawaketa.
6. konosia rawaketa = (literally) the palace of Knossos for the Commander-in-Chief, i.e. his official residence, but in Knossos only. In Mycenae, his official residence would have been called the rawaketero.
7. konosia qasireu = (literally) the palace of Knossos for the prince potentate, but in Knossos only. In Mycenae, his official residence would have been called the qasireuo.
AT THE NEXT LEVEL, we find the mid-level administrators:
8. porokorete = the district governors, meaning the rulers of the districts in the Mycenaean Empire, such as the district of Mycenae itself, and the districts of Knossos, Phaistos, Pylos and the Hither Provinces (the closer provinces, such as Tiryns, Pylos, Argos, Lerna etc.) and of the Farther Provinces (Thebes, Orochomenos, Eutresis etc.)
9. korete = so-called mayors or chief administrators of cities or primary settlements, such as Knossos, and the centres of the Hither and Farther Provinces. These officials reported directly to the porokorete.
AT THE NEXT LEVEL, we find
10 the freemen or woko of the cities or primary settlements, such as craftsmen, artisans, farmers and tenant farmers, fishermen
and finally, AT THE LOWEST LEVEL
11. chattel (privately owned workers) doeroi = slaves, temple slaves = rawaiai or temenoio doeroi and nawoio doeroi = galley slaves.
       
P.S. This one is specially for you, Rita!

Minoan Linear A ideogram for “man” “soldier” + supersyllabogram KA = kapa = Mycenaean Linear B = eqeta

Minoan Linear A ideogram for “man” “soldier” + supersyllabogram KA = kapa = Mycenaean Linear B = eqeta:



The illustration above highlights the Minoan Linear A ideogram for “man” “soldier” + supersyllabogram KA = kapa = Mycenaean Linear B = eqeta, which in turn is the Mycenaean military functionary called in English “soldier” (approximately).  Actually, the eqeta were the personal attendants of the rawaketa or Leader of the Host (Homeric), otherwise known as the Commander-in-Chief. Yet this title was often synonymous with wanaka, the king, who in the case of the Trojan War was none other than Agamemnon. Since the high Minoan civilization (Late Middle Minoan MMIIIb, ca 1600 BCE)



preceded the Mycenaean at Knossos (Late Minoan III, ca 1450 BCE) by about 150 years, it is of course impossible to directly cross-correlate the Minoan word kapa with the Mycenaean eqeta, which came much later, typically at Mycenae itself and at Pylos (ca 1400-1200 BCE). So kapa may not strictly mean “follower”, but simply “soldier” or “foot soldier”. Yet it must be said in all fairness that the Minoan soldier was highly likely to be a subaltern, in other words, follower of his ultimate supernumerary, the King of Knossos.   

I am relatively confident of my decipherment, given that Haghia Triada tablet HT 94 mentions 62 kapa, a number commensurate with a company of followers or (foot) soldiers, attendants to the King. 

This is the fifty-seventh (57) Minoan Linear A word I have deciphered, more or less accurately (in this case more).

Followers on Twitter up to 1,402 from 1,200 in 2 months + Rita Roberts = 518 for a total of 1,920

Followers on Twitter up to 1,402 from 1,200 in 2 months + Rita Roberts = 518 for a total of 1,920

Our followers on Twitter, to KONOSO = 1402 from 1200 two months ago,



and on Rita Roberts = 518



for a total of 1,920, closing in on 2,000! Amazing! ... considering how esoteric Linear B is!

Our followers on Twitter now exceed 1,000 + with our partners, Koryvantes (the Association of Historical Studies (Athens), Rita Roberts (Crete) & Spyros Bakas (Greece, Poland)…

Our followers on Twitter now exceed 1,000 + with our partners, Koryvantes (the Association of Historical Studies (Athens), Rita Roberts (Crete) & Spyros Bakas (Greece, Poland)...

Followers of KONOSO: 1,008: Click the banner to visit our Twitter account, and sign up too, if you like!



Followers of Rita Roberts: 403
Followers of Koryvantes, the Association of Historical Studies (Athens): 203
Followers of Spyros Bakas: 80

That gives us 1,694 followers all told. Not bad at all, for topics as esoteric as Mycenaen civilization and Mycenaean Linear B!

Richard
  

Our Twitter Account is growing rapidly! 15 new followers in the past 10 days: Click to visit & follow us:

Our Twitter Account is growing rapidly! 15 new followers in the past 10 days: Click to visit & follow us:



It no longer comes as any surprise that the number of followers on our Twitter account is growing as fast as it is.  We had about 800 followers in December 2014, and now we are at 855. Some months we grow as fast as 25 new followers. This is an extremely encouraging sign with respect to the considerable attention our Twitter account is getting, and for this we have to thank our blog’s newly acquired position as the largest Linear B blog on the Internet... and all this in less than 2 years. Now that we are on the brink of making a newsworthy announcement to the world on a major breakthrough in the decipherment of Mycenaean Linear B and our participation as an invited speaker at the Conference, Thinking Symbols, at the Pultusk Academy of Humanities, University of Warsaw, June 30-July 2, 2015, it is more than likely that the number of followers we have will increase to beyond 1,000 by the end of 2015 at the latest. For a blog as specialized and as narrowly focused as ours is, that is quite a spectacular accomplishment. And for this I have only to thank the hundreds of supporters who have already been so kind as to follow us so closely.

In passing, I should like to point out that a large number of the most prestigious language and linguistics Twitter accounts, especially those devoted to Greek, ancient and modern, as well as several major international archaeological associations & archaeologists, are following us assiduously, as we are of course following them. 

And if you want to learn modern Greek, you can pick up quite a lot of it on our account, since I have already retweeted hundreds of quotations from modern Greek Twitter accounts.    


Richard

Our own Page in PARTNERSHIP on Koryvantes, The Association of Historical Studies (Greece)

Our own Page in PARTNERSHIP on Koryvantes, The Association of Historical Studies (Greece)

Click here to visit our own page in our professional partnership with Koryvantes, Koryvantes, The Association of Historical Studies:



Koryvantes has done an extremely professional job of designing our page on his magnificent site, and we hope we have done the same for his Association on ours, here:



We URGE all of our visitors to visit Koryvantes, The Association of Historical Studies, in Greece, as often as possible, since their research into ancient Greek warfare and weaponry is of the very highest order. Koryvantes discusses Greek warfare and weaponry from all historical eras, right down from the Mycenaean to the Byzantine, accompanied b magnificent illustrations of Greek warriors and weapons. His site is a must see! 

Koryvantes is a MAJOR contributor and attendee at numerous International Conferences and Meetings all over Europe!

Richard

Our Twitter Followers up to 801 Jan. 2015 from 500 Jan. 2014! With our thanks – Richard

Our Twitter Followers up to 801 Jan. 2015 from 500 Jan. 2014! With our thanks - Richard 

Here is my own Twitter account: Click to visit



If you too wish to follow us, we would be most obliged. Given the esoteric nature of Mycenaean Linear B, Arcado-Cypriot Linear C & Minoan Linear A, it is a wonder we have so many followers.

Here is the Twitter account of my research colleague, Rita Roberts: Click to visit



This means that between us, we now have 1164 followers. That really pleases me.

Richard

 

Our seemingly esoteric Twitter account, Knossos KONOSO, is now attracting the Big Guns!

Our seemingly Twitter account, Knossos KONOSO, is now attracting the Big Guns! Click to ENLARGE:


I simply could not believe my eyes when I checked our Twitter Account:


Earlier today, only to discover that in just the past week or so that we are starting to attract the really big guns on Twitter! I put together the collage of really big Twitter accounts you see above, and when I tallied up the total number of followers they all garnish together, the sum came to over 1,130,000 followers. This means, in plain and simple terms, that this many followers are already following our blog indirectly. Meanwhile, the number of our direct followers continues to grow at the rate of least 10 more per week, now sitting at 730. This is simply astonishing! Something tells me Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae has, as the old saying goes, arrived, suddenly and in a big way.

At the same time as this development has been occurring, our Linear B blog has risen to second place overall among Linear B blogs in a general Google search on “Mycenaean Linear B”, just behind Omniglot, Linear B Syllabary – the ancient script of Crete: Click the Google banner for search results:

  

Richard

Maybe we should rename our blog, The Mycenaean Man Blog! Check this out…

Maybe we should rename our blog, The Mycenaean Man Blog! Check this out...

Mycenaean Man! Click to ENLARGE


In the past couple of months, the number of visits to our well-established Linear B Blog, which is after all only 19 months old, has taken off. So I thought it would be (in-)appropriate to rename it, The Mycenaean Man Blog, only to be told flat-out by my colleague, Rita Roberts, that I must be nuts! Just kidding, she never said that, though I would not blame her if she did. At any rate, the number of visitors to our blog is reflected on a parallel plane by the significant rise in the number of followers Rita and I now have on Twitter, which has risen by 50% in just 3 months, from around 1,000 to almost 1,500 today!  What’s more, take a look at the number of Tweets we have posted on Twitter... almost 19,000 between the two of us, meaning that we will soon crack the 20K mark.

Our Twitter followers and our Tweets to date: Click to ENLARGE 


These are astonishing figures, considering that Mycenaean Linear B is, after all, hardly the sort of thing folks talk about around the kitchen table if at all, for that matter, since I am quite sure at least 98 % of the 7 + billion folks on this poor little planet of ours have ever even heard of Linear B, and probably could care less about it. But once we have hooked our followers, they hang in there with us. This is scarcely surprising to either Rita or myself, since we have always taken several new, refreshing and frankly unheard of approaches to date to research into Mycenaean Linear B, approaches which can be attested to by the often amazing posts we have on our Blog. But hey, why not? If no one else will go this route (probably being too chicken to) neither nor Rita nor I are chickens (in all senses of the word),

No Chickens! Click to ENLARGE


and so we forge merrily ahead in our pursuit of new avenues into international research into Mycenaean Linear B, Minoan Linear A, and even Arcado-Cypriot Linear C (that dialect being the closest cousin to Mycenaean Greek by a long shot). This is a particularly important new phase in the study of Linear B, one which every researcher in the field without exception has blithely ignored for the last 64 years since the great Michael Ventris deciphered this previously totally unknown syllabary. We certainly cannot blame him for that, as he had his hands full with Linear B, and anyway, he died very young (age 34) in a car crash, much as had his contemporary, the famous and beautiful American actor, James Dean.

Now, let me assure you. Almost all our posts on our Blog are dedicated to the most serious research one could imagine into Linear A, B & C, Homeric Greek, ancient Greek, and so on. But one does need to take an occasional break from the dead serious to the all-out hilarious. And so we do. Be forewarned. This is the last post of the latter ilk for the rest of 2014. So don’t hold your breath!

Richard

Generously retweet from fellow researchers and aficionados of ancient Greece and watch what happens!

Generously retweet from fellow researchers and aficionados of ancient Greece and watch what happens! Click to ENLARGE:


Thanks to timely assistance from my colleague and fellow Linear B researcher, Rita Roberts in Herakleion, Crete, right next door to Knossos, who showed me how to insert photos, charts and translations of Linear B tablets, I was suddenly able to increase the number of photos etc. on my Twitter account:


from only 13 to 115 illustrations in just 3 days! This finally gave me the confidence to start retweeting similar tweets from fellow researchers into ancient Greece, ancient Greek and the ancient world in general, and even to post those illustrations of mine which I was quite sure would appeal to each person I retweeted, as well as favoriting their tweets. The result has been nothing short of astonishing! Suddenly, the number of my followers jumped from 620 to 668 in just 3 days, while the number of visits to our Blog have concomitantly risen from an average of about 60-75 per day to almost double that, clocking in at around 120-180 per day. I never expected that, but it sure is very encouraging. To the extent that we support our fellow researchers and aficionados of ancient Greece and Greek, we soon find ourselves rewarded by reciprocal endorsement from our new friends. Karma.

Besides, 668 followers for something as esoteric and far-out as Mycenaean Linear B and Arcado-Cypriot Linear C is rather impressive, if you ask me. 

So allow me, my new friends on Twitter, to extend my gratitude and thanks for your reciprocal support.


Richard