9.3: A Brief Outline of Aegean Clay Tablets
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Chronology and Distribution
At present it remains unclear which of the two Minoan scripts is earlier. The answer to this question lies in the interpretation of the inscriptions from prepalatial seals of the so-called Archanes Script (Godart and Tzedakis 1992: 108, 121–122; Grumach and Sakellarakis 1966; see also Flouda, this volume; Whittaker, this volume): some interpret them as Cretan Hieroglyphic, some as Linear A (Godart 1999; Olivier and Godart 1996; Sakellarakis and Sapouna-Sakellaraki 1997: 326–330). For the present study, however, such a chronological intricacy has no cru- cial relevance, since the earliest preserved clay tablets postdate these Archanes seals. (I do not intend to get involved in a detailed discussion of the absolute chronology of the Aegean Bronze Age here. It suffices to say that Middle Minoan (MM) covers a period of c. 2100 / 2000–1700 / 1600 bc and Late Minoan I (LM I) a period of c. 1700 / 1600–1450 bc; for a detailed discussion, see Warren and Hankey 1989; see also Whittaker, this volume.)
I have already mentioned that Cretan Hieroglyphic tablets are rare: two have been discovered in the Hieroglyphic Deposit of the palace at Knossos, two in the palace of Malia, and one in the palace of Phaistos (Olivier and Godart 1996: 122–123, 172–175, 182–183). Whereas the Phaistos example is of an uncertain date, and the precise date of the Knossian Hieroglyphic Deposit is still a subject of debate (for the latter see the overview of different opinions in Schoep 2001: 147–148), the two tablets from Malia are securely dated to the MM III period (Chapouthier 1930).
A total of some 350 tablets has been discovered amongst Linear A documents, although many in a fragmentary state (Godart and Olivier 1976–1985). The earliest Linear A tablets are an MM IIA example from Knossos (del Freo 2007: 204–205; Schoep [2007] suggests that this may in fact be a Cretan Hieroglyphic tablet) and some 20 tablets from the MM IIB layers of the palace at Phaistos (Pugliese Carratelli 1958). Only a small number of Linear A tablets are of the MM III date while the majority are from the final phase of the administrative use of Linear A, that is, the end of the LM IB period ( c .1450 bc), with the largest number, 147 tablets, coming from Haghia Triada (Ayia Triada) (Halbherr et al. 1977).
At least 5000 tablets with Linear B are known. The earliest are c .650 tablets from the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos (hereafter RCT), dated to LM II or early LM IIIA1 (Driessen 1990: 117). The remainder of the approximately 2800 Knossian tablets are probably of LM IIIA2 date (the most recent overview of disputes concerning the date of the final destruction of Knossos and therefore of the majority of its Linear B tablets, is given in Driessen 2008: 70–72; the corpus of Knossian tablets is published by Chadwick et al . 1986–1998). Other Linear B tablets come from Chania on Crete and major Mycenaean centres on the Greek Mainland. Apart from a few odd examples from the LH IIIA period (Palaima 1983; Shelton 2002–2003), these are all of the LH IIIB date. The Pylos archive with approximately 1100 tablets is the largest in this group (Blegen and Rawson 1966: 92–101). It is followed by nearly 400 tablets from Thebes (Aravantinos et al . 2002; 2008), while there are smaller numbers of tablets from Mycenae, Tiryns and Chania (Andreadaki- Vlasaki and Hallager 2007; Godart 1988; Hallager and Vlasaki 1997; Melena and Olivier 1991; Sacconi 1974).
Shape
There are two principal shapes of Aegean clay tablets: the elongated (also called palm-leaf shaped tablets) and the page-shaped. Linear B makes use of both shapes (the former were used for simple entries, the latter for summarising records, cf. Driessen 1999: 207–208), whereas only page-shaped tablets were employed during the latest stages of Linear A. We do find several elongated tablets inscribed in Linear A, but they are dated to MM II or MM III; no elongated tablets with Linear A have been found amongst the latest surviving, LM IB documents. It should be noted that some LM IB Linear A tablets are far too fragmentary to make a definite decision about their shape, but, since not a single complete elongated tablet has been preserved in any LM IB deposit, we can assume that those tablets that are now fragmentary were also page-shaped when complete. As for Cretan Hieroglyphic tablets, the five preserved examples are all elongated, but thicker than most Linear A and Linear B elongated tablets.
Size
Linear A page-shaped tablets are generally smaller than Linear B ones, as is the average amount of information on them (on complete Linear A tablets the average number of signs per tablet is only 30). The overall proportion of the size of tablets and the ‘crowdedness’ of signs inscribed on them shows that Linear B page-shaped tablets hold a larger amount of information on the available space. As proposed elsewhere (Tomas 2011) there may be several reasons for this: the different nature of the two languages being recorded (Linear A sign-groups, i.e. words, are generally shorter than those of Linear B, see Duhoux 1978: 68), different methods of recording information (for example, Linear A may have used abbreviations more frequently), or different administrative practices (for example, Linear B page-shaped tablets may have been intended to contain more information than Linear A page-shaped tablets; perhaps in Linear A more extensive information was recorded on some other material, possibly perishable, cf. Driessen and Schoep 1999: 392; Olivier 1987: 230).
The small number of Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A elongated tablets precludes any sensible comparison to their numerous counterparts in Linear B, especially since the nature of elongated Linear B tablets changed drastically over time. Thus, elongated tablets tend to be smaller and with little text in the RCT, larger in the later Knossian deposits, and much larger and with more abundant text at Pylos. Driessen (1988: 132) notes that very small elongated tablets are frequent in the RCT and completely absent elsewhere: their dimensions are less than 0.6 cm thick, less than 0.2 cm high and less than 0.4 cm long. Their small size suggests that they were meant to be documents that could easily be carried around by individuals. Since it is precisely this type of tablet that in Linear B is most frequently the outcome of cutting (i.e. dividing of a larger tablet into smaller ones) they will be addressed below in more detail.