9.4: The Practice of Cutting Aegean Clay Tablets
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The practice of cutting tablets is evident in both Linear A and Linear B administrative systems. The tablets were cut while still moist, probably with a knife, or other sharp tool. The few surviving Cretan Hieroglyphic tablets do not show traces of cutting, but this does not necessarily mean that this practice was unknown to the system.
The reasons for this practice seem to be clearer in Linear B than in Linear A. In Linear B, tablets were most probably cut after having been inscribed, when the residue of clay with no text was removed, possibly to be reused to form other tablets or to economise on space needed for their transport and storage (see below). It is mostly elongated tablets that were cut (on their left or right side, or even both sides), whereas page-shaped tablets were cut only occasionally (usually at the bottom, exceptionally at the top). This habit of cutting tablets is especially apparent in the RCT, where about 20% of tablets were cut (whereas only 5% of the rest of the Knossian tablets were cut, cf. Driessen 1988: 134), and most of those are of an elongated shape. In addition to removing non-inscribed clay, another explanation has been proposed for the cutting of the RCT elongated tablets: the practice of dividing a set of information into separate records. By rejoining these small elongated tablets one can easily see that they initially belonged to one larger tablet. The name introduced to describe this kind of document is a simili -join : larger tablets were probably divided into these smaller units for the purpose of rearranging the information (Driessen 1987), as is further elaborated below. Simili -joins are a feature almost unique to the RCT.
In comparison to Linear B, the practice of cutting tablets in Linear A is less well-understood. In Haghia Triada, the site with the largest number of Linear A tablets (147), only 10 tablets are cut, most of them at the bottom, some on their right or left sides (see also Schoep 1998–1999: 279). We cannot claim here that this was done, as in Linear B, after the text was inscribed and in order to remove a blank and therefore superfluous part of the tablet. In fact the scribes of the Haghia Triada tablets seem not to have been so preoccupied with saving space on tablets or neatness of filing. In most cases, when the tablets were cut, this was not done immediately below the end of the text, but further down or on the side, thus leaving plenty of unused space (e.g. HT 1, HT 2, HT 21, HT 92, HT 133, HT 154B, Figure 1 ). This suggests that the tablets at Haghia Triada were cut before they were inscribed and that the estimation of the space needed for the text was often incorrect, since many cut tablets are still too large for the inscribed text. By contrast, the tablet HT 10a was cut and then was too small for the required text, so the numbers at the end of the bottom line were crammed into the corner ( Figure 2 ). (There is another possible explanation for the lack of space on this tablet: the tablet is a palimpsest, which means that it was probably cut to fit an erased text that was shorter than that which is preserved; cf. Piquette, this volume.)
Such a lack of coordination between the size of Haghia Triada tablets and the length of their inscriptions tells us something about the process of producing tablets. It is obvious that a tablet was conceived separately from the text, and at the time of its production the scribe did not yet have a clear idea of the amount of the text to be written thereon. Such a disparity furthermore suggests that the scribes of Haghia Triada did not produce their own tablets, but had assistants for that task, so called ‘flatteners’. The opposite may be argued for the Linear A tablets from Chania. If we compare these to tablets from Haghia Triada, we notice that the former display a much better correlation between the size of a tablet and the length of its inscription. When Chania tablets were cut, this was in most cases done immediately beneath the last line (for example, KH 6, KH 8, KH 9, KH 10, KH 21, KH 58, etc.). This means that the collaboration between the scribe and the flattener was much closer in Chania than in Haghia Triada — or even that they were the same person (see also Schoep 2002: 76).
Whether a Linear A scribe and a flattener were the same person is an issue that requires a more thorough investigation, perhaps also a study of palm- and finger-prints which has helped to resolve similar questions in the case of Linear B tablets. Thus, Sjöquist and Åström’s (1991) study of palm- and finger-prints in Knossos has shown that the tablets were usually made by assistants, only occasionally by the scribes themselves. The flatteners were sometimes children, perhaps apprentices, and sometimes adults whose hands saw hard work (visible from their rough and extended pores; Sjöquist and Åström 1991: 7, 20, 29–30). In contrast, for the case of Pylos, Palaima argues that scribes made their own tablets. His conclusion is not based on palm- and finger-prints, but on shapes of tablets that are characteristic of certain scribes (Palaima 1985: 102; 1988: 27; for a discussion of the correspondence between scribes and flatteners in the RCT, see Driessen 2000: 43–44, who concludes that they were never the same person; see also Firth 2012).
Until questions like this are answered for the Linear A tablets as well, we may provisionally conclude that Linear A scribes / flatteners had little foreknowledge of the amount of text that had to be fitted on a tablet. As for the cutting of tablets, it has been shown that this practice was less common in Linear A, and was also — Chania tablets excepted — inefficiently practised. If the purpose of this practice was to accommodate shorter texts, as in Linear B, why are most cut tablets still too large for the inscribed texts?