9.6: Conclusion
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It has been shown that the practice of cutting clay tablets, as far as present evidence tells us, was known to two of the total of three Aegean administrative systems. Cretan Hieroglyphic tablets, preserved in small numbers, do not show traces of cutting. Cretan Hieroglyphic bars, on the other hand, do have a single case of cutting. Inscribed vertical lines on such bars resemble similar lines which marked where the Linear B (RCT) elongated tablets should be cut, but it was concluded that the lines on Cretan Hieroglyphic documents did not have the same function.
Reasons behind Linear A cutting, especially in Haghia Triada, remain unclear, since cut tablets are too spacious for the inscribed text, so getting rid of superfluous parts of tablets is not a valid explanation.
In Linear B, at least in Knossos, cutting was practised on both types of tablets, the difference being that page-shaped tablets are less frequently cut than elongated tablets. In both cases, two alternative procedures of cutting are possible: 1) that a scribe had no clear preconception of the amount of the text for the particular tablet, so the tablet was cut after having been inscribed in order to remove the residue of clay with no text; 2) that even before writing, a scribe had a clear idea of the amount of the text, so that the tablet, if made too large, was cut even before it was inscribed. For the purpose of this study it does not particularly matter in which order this was done; we will probably never be able to reconstruct the order. For now it is more important to establish that page-shaped tablets were probably cut in order to remove unnecessary clay, whereas elongated tablets may also have been cut for the purpose of rearranging the information.
In connection to all this, I conclude with three points that remain unclear and therefore present areas for further research for the question of writing as material practice. The first point is that although Linear B had much firmer pinacological and epigraphical rules than Linear A (Tomas 2012), some uncut page-shaped tablets are too large for their text (for example, KN E 749+5532 or KN C 911), meaning that they were for some reason left uncut, even though the practice of cutting was familiar to Linear B scribes. We do not know why this is so.
Secondly, if we accept that Linear B tablets were cut to accommodate shorter texts, why are some cut tablets still too large for the text inscribed (for example, TH Av 104[+])191)? Cases like this are not plentiful, but they do recall similar cases of Linear A cut tablets from Haghia Triada, as previously discussed.
The final point may simply be a coincidence resulting from the poor state of preservation of Linear B tablets, but it is very interesting to note that in Knossos the left or the right side of many fully preserved elongated tablets has been produced by cutting (e.g. KN Fp 5, KN V 56 from other Knossian deposits, or KN Sc 103+5069+5145 and numerous examples from the RCT). Only a few fully preserved elongated tablets from Knossos have uncut edges! It is usually assumed that the Linear B flatteners formed smaller individual elongated tablets for an already targeted textual record, but this cutting evidence begs the question of whether this was really the case at Knossos. It is more likely that the flatteners would typically produce one long elongated tablet with no particular text in mind, and such a tablet was then written and cut into separate records as the information was forthcoming. Once the corpus is published, it will be interesting to see whether the Pylian elongated tablets support this suggestion and what other evidence may emerge to further clarify our understanding of these documents in relation to material practice.