Chapter 4 part I “Debugging the process of building a repertory of the Southeastern European signs” from the book Neo-Eneolithic Literacy in Southeastern Europe PDF

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4 DEBUGGING THE PROCESS OF BUILDING A REPERTORY OF THE SOUTHEASTERN EUROPEAN SIGNS 4.A The presence of an inventory as a key element for any system of writing The present section intends to focus on the features of the inventories that have been already addressed concerning the signs of a script tha...

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4 DEBUGGING THE PROCESS OF BUILDING A REPERTORY OF THE SOUTHEASTERN EUROPEAN SIGNS

4.A The presence of an inventory as a key element for any system of writing The present section intends to focus on the features of the inventories that have been already addressed concerning the signs of a script that developed in Southeastern Europe during the Neolithic and Copper Age times. Though this script is now lost and it is unlikely it will ever be possible to decipher it, one can try to identify some elements of its semiotic code and particularly shapes and categories of signs. The reoccurrence of the same signs and groups of signs on artifacts of the Danube civilization points to the fact that they include precise standard shapes and that scribes may have made use of a common inventory. This topic will be introduced by notes concerning the inventories of the already deciphered scripts when they may be in alignment with the Danube script. In fact, every system of writing employs a catalogue of signs and each group is distinct, defined, and limited. An inventory is a precise corpus of signs and not an account of marks drawn according to the writer‘s individual expression. The presence of an inventory of signs is one of the four essential elements of any system of writing which distinguish ars scribendi from other communicational channels, such as calendars, symbols, accounting systems, heraldic markings, etc. Therefore, a preliminary step in the deciphering process of an ancient script is compiling a catalogue of all the apparently different characters occurring in the texts and attempting to identify the variations each character may undergo. If one was to take a typical chapter of an ordinary novel printed in English, it would be a fairly straightforward matter, by careful study and comparison of the thousands of characters in the text, to work out that they could be classified into a set of signs. However, texts of ancient scripts such as the Danube script were handwritten with a sharp stick or a bone on irregular surfaces of clay, rocks, or bone. The rough and restricted surfaces conditioned and limited the graphic expression. The task of isolating and detecting the signs is made far more difficult by the possibility to represent the same sign in dissimilar ways as allographs, which are the alternative forms of a letter of an alphabet or another unit of a writing system. 1 Signs were also joined up by ligatures and positioned in spatial association with symbols. A key challenge for the decipherer - who naturally cannot be sure in advance that different-looking signs are in fact allographs of the same sign - is how to distinguish signs which are genuinely different, such as 'I' and '1', from signs which are probably allographs (for example, ), without knowing the phonetic or conceptual values of the signs under examination. Based on practice in known writing systems, an undeciphered script as the Danube one may contain several allographs of the same basic sign. Unless epigraphers became able to distinguish the allographs with a fair degree of confidence, generally comparing their contexts in many very similar inscriptions, they can neither correctly classify the signs in the Danube script in order to build an inventory of them; neither establish the total number of signs. However, in decipherment the number of different signs can be a clue to the type of script involved without revealing the phonetic or conceptual values of the signs. A small number, between 20 to 40 signs, indicates an alphabet or a consonant script (like Hebrew and Arabic). A greater variety, between 40 to 90 signs or so, suggests a syllabary or an abugida.2 Several hundreds or more, point to a logosyllabary that mixes relatively small numbers of phonetic signs with large numbers of logograms, such as found in Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Babylonian cuneiform, Chinese script and Japanese kanji (Chadwick 1958: 41-43; Coe 1999: 43-44; Robinson 2002: 40-43).

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The same sign written in a variant form is known in epigraphy as an allograph (Hawthorn London 2000). Abugida (or alphasyllabary) describes a writing system in which each character denotes a consonant associated with a following, specific vowel (Thus, in an abugida there is no sign for "d", but instead one for "da", if "a" is the inherent vowel). When a different vowel is wanted, it is added to the consonant or a diacritic or some other consistent modification is made to it. An abugida is to be contrasted with a syllabary, where symbols with similar sounds look nothing like one another. About half the writing systems in the world, including the extensive Brahmic system used for most Indo-Aryan languages, are abugida (Daniels, Bright 1996: 4). See paragraph 1.C.b “Phonetic writing systems”. 2

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When Champollion began dealing with hieroglyphics, or Rawlinson and others began working with cuneiform, they could count signs in the available inscriptions, but the idea that the number of signs might convey important information about the structure of the writing system was not understood. Based on the number of Linear B signs, Michael Ventris was convinced that it was a syllabic script, rather than an alphabet or a logosyllabic one, which was an important historic step for decipherment of this Aegean system of writing.

4.B Inventories of the “cracked” scripts: Analogies with the Danube script 4.B.a The syllabic list of Linear B signs Linear B was the script of the Mycenaeans and it is the earliest European script we can understand. Sir Arthur Evans named it “Linear” because the signs were uncomplex outlines and “B” because it was predated by another linear writing he called “A”. Linear B is the first Greek writing system and has proved to be the oldest surviving record of the ancient Greek dialect known as Mycenaean, which was spoken on the Greek mainland and on Crete by the Bronze Age populations from 17th to 11th century BCE. The Mycenaean Greek dialect belongs to the Indo-European Arcado-Cypriot family and predated by 900 centuries the earliest Greek literary evidence, i.e. the Homeric poems. The Mycenaean Greek dialect was the ancestor both of the Arcadic, spoken in the first millennium BCE in the mountainous region of Arcadia (Peloponnesus), and of the Cypriot spoken in Cyprus, eccentric to the Aegean See barycentre, where was written in Cypriot-Syllabic. Linear B is a quasi-syllabary, i.e., a system that uses syllabograms as its basic letters but represents some syllables with letter combinations rather than single letters. Therefore, this script is a principally syllabic with additional pictographic/ideographic and numerical components. Linear B consists of about 87 signs. Its inventory is composed of seven elements: i mostly of open syllabic signs of the ‘consonant + vowel’ form (e.g. na, ne, ni, no, nu). Closed syllables consisting either of vowel + consonant or of consonant + vowel + consonant do not occur. ii signs for pure vowels: a, e, i, o, u iii a supplementary group of signs which are not strictly necessary but may be used either as abbreviations or to give a more accurate spelling, reducing the risk of misinterpretation iv over one hundred pictograms and ideograms v metric signs vi arithmetic sings of a number system based on 10 vii short vertical lines as word separators. It was often hard to decide whether two marks represented different letters or variants of the same letter. The graphological analysis of the texts in Linear B reveals sixty-six scribal hands in the Knossos archives and forty-five at Pylos. The differences among the scribal hands, however, indicate individual varieties of the script and not regional ones. Linear B was written more or less in a standardized way at all places where the Mycenaean administration was installed. Nevertheless, “standardization” does not mean that the scribe wrote a “copy-book” by hand. There were many personal variations. The following chart features the basic Linear B syllabary as agreed today (Robinson 2002). i.–ii. Open syllabic signs and signs for pure vowels It consists of signs for the five vowels and signs for each of the twelve consonants combined with each of these vowels. Gaps in the table may indicate that there never existed a sign for that value or that are still unidentified. The forms on show are merely typical specimens. Dealing with a handwriting, there where a number of variant forms in use. The shown values are not strict representation of the sound, but merely conventional notations, and interpretation is needed to reconstruct from them the spoken form. As any other script, Linear B signs are an outline notation that the reader has to fill in for himself. Even the Mycenaean reader must have been left a lot 96

of guesswork to understand words out of what he read on the tablet. This situation would be quite intolerable if script were used for correspondence or legislations. In fact, it has been used for lists and accounts read only by the writer and his colleagues working in the same administration or archive.

Fig. 4.1 – Stirrup jar with Linear B inscription. It comes from the Perseia Well, outside the Mycenae acropolis ( Late Helladic phase, LH IIIB, 13th century BCE). The inscription consists of five ideograms with transliteration: e-ra, ka-ta-ro. The meaning is either “virgin oil” (έλαιο καθαρό), or “to Hera (the) pure”, i.e. to the Goddess Hera this pure (virgin oil) is dedicated. National Museum of Athens inv. 7628. (Photo Merlini 2005). iii. Optional signs used either as abbreviations or to clarify the spelling of a word In addition to the standard syllabic grid, there are 16 optional signs used to clarify the spelling of a word in order to reduce the risk of misinterpretation. Some of these signs can be considered abbreviations in that they represent diphthongs. 3 Linear B was apparently designed for a non-Greek language, as it does not fit the sounds of Greek very well. In fact, it is likely that Linear A was used to write the pre-Greek language of Crete, and the Greeks developed Linear B adopting and adapting Linear A for their own use, but without changing how the system fundamentally worked. In doing so, they inserted in Linear B some necessary "spelling conventions" to represent sound patterns found in Greek but not in the syllabary.

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Note that I use traditional transcription here, where j actually represented the sound [y], q is actually the sound [kw], and z is theorized to be [dz]. 97

First, there are many Greek sounds that are missing in Linear B signs, such as [g], [kh], [gw], [b], [ph], [th], and [l]. To solve this problem, signs for similar sounds are used instead (K Lo 2004): o p-signs are used for [p], [b], and [ph]; o k-signs are used for [k], [g], and [kh]; o t-signs are used for [t] and [th]; o q-signs are used for [kw] and [gw]; o r-signs are used for [r] and [l]. Another inadequacy comes from the fact that Linear B signs usually represent open syllabic signs of the form consonant + vowel (CV), but the syllabic structure of Greek allows initial consonant clusters, ending consonants, and diphthongs. Here it is the solution: in the case of a syllable with an initial consonant cluster, individual consonants in the cluster are written by a CV sign whose vowel matches the vowel of the syllable. Therefore, for example, the word tri is written as ti-ri, and khrusos as ku-ru-so. Linear B often omitted sounds in initial consonant clusters. Anyway, ending consonants such as [l], [m], [n], [r], and [s] are not usually written (for example, the Greek word for seed, sperma, would appear in Linear B as "pe-ma."), whereas other consonants such as [k] and [p] are written in a way similar to initial consonants. The following chart shows how ending consonants are written out (K Lo 2004). Diphthongs are similar to ending consonants in that sometimes they are written and sometimes omitted. Diphthongs ending with [-u] are usually written out completely, with a preceding sign denoting the first vowel in the diphthong, followed by the u sign that denotes the diphthong’s second vowel. For example, the word leuka is written as re-u-ka. The optional sign a2 also stands for a word-initial [au] diphthong. A diphthong ending in [-i] usually omits the second vowel of [-i], such as poimen is written as po-me, and pherei as pe-re. However, occasionally all vowels in the diphthong are indicated, either by spelling out each of the vowels in the diphthong (such as the city "Phaistos" is written as pa-i-to), or with the optional signs illustrated above (such as a3 and ra3). Diphthongs with starting [i-] or [u-] are usually written completely. In some cases, vowel-only signs are used to indicate the second vowel in the diphthong (such as [kia] is written as ki-a). However, most of the time, a sign of either the wV or the jV type is used to indicate the entire diphthong, with the vowel in the preceding CV sign matching the first vowel in the diphthong sign (in this case, [kia] is written as ki-ja). In a few cases, an optional sign with a diphthong, such as dwe and twe, is used. iv. Over one hundred pictograms and ideograms In addition to phonetic signs, Linear B also employs several pictograms and ideograms. The pictograms represent people, animals, plants, a variety of commodities and physical objects (mainly items that were traded as Linear B was used mainly for recording transactions). Some pictograms are recognizable at first sight, while others are more iconic or symbolic and become clear only by identifying the context in which they were used. Chadwick mentions the interesting example of the sign intended as “cloth” which was probably in origin a picture of an upright loom with weight at the bottom to keep the warp under tension (Chadwick 1987: 22). The signs for “wheat” and “barley” have outlines that look more like the plants. Similarly, “wine” illustrates a vine growing on a trellis, and “olive oil” is a deformation of an olive tree. Not all the pictograms and ideograms have been deciphered. Chadwick stresses that pictograms and ideograms were not used as means of writing a word (logograms), but merely as symbols to indicate what the Mycenaeans wanted to count, like men, women, horses, gold, bronze, and wheat. This means that they are normally found only before numerals. In some cases, the word describing the object being counted is first spelled out syllabically, and then the relevant pictogram or ideogram is written before the numeral (Chadwick 1987: 22). Some syllabograms are also used alone as ideograms following two cases. In some situations scribes employed the acrophonic principle (for example, in English a picture of the sun could represent the sound /s/); and in other situations they used syllabograms which are straightforward abbreviation of Greek words (o for o-pe-ro meaning “deficit”). In general, the phonetic values of these syllabograms do not match the word they represent. For example, the ideogram for 'sheep' is the qi syllabogram, but 'sheep' in Mycenaean Greek should be owis (compare with Classical Greek ois, Latin ovis, etc). Maybe the reason is that these dual-role 98

signs were taken over from Linear A, where the sound may have been that of the initial syllable of the name in the pre-Greek language of Crete (Chadwick 1987: 30).

Fig. 4.2 - Linear B inventory. (After Robinson 2002: 88). 99

In addition, ideograms can be created by putting two or more syllabograms into a ligature (a fusion of originally separate signs into what is then effectively a new single sign, thus allowing the desired meaning to be expressed more quickly). Finally, animals and the sex of the animal can be marked by diacritical markers to the sign. The basic ideogram usually represents the species of the animal, whereas two short horizontal lines denote the male, and Λ identifies the female.

Fig. 4.3 – Ideograms in Linear B. (After Encyclopedia Britannica). v. System of measurement Metric signs are a special type of ideogram. There are three series of metric signs: for weight, dry measure and liquid measure. The Mycenaeans must have also a system of linear measure, but there is no trace of it. The divergence of the systems of measurement between Linear B and Linear A was demonstrated by E. L. Bennett Jr.

Fig. 4.4 – The Linear B system of weights.

Fig. 4.5 – The Linear B system of dry measures.

Fig. 4.6 – The Linear B system of liquid measures

vi. Numerical system In the decipherment of Linear B, the first step towards the solution was the explanation of the numerical and metrical systems. The numerals were straightforward and were tabulated by Evans at an early stage. The number system of Linear B is fundamentally base-10. It has five signs, each of which denotes a power of 10, 100

i.e. a vertical line stands for 1, a horizontal line for 10, a circle for 100, and so on. The number system included fractions, but not having the number 0. It is not a not positional system and figures up to 9 are represented by repeating the sign the appropriate number of time. To write a number, you begin with the highest power of 10, and go toward lower ones. For each power of 10, you repeat the corresponding sign until you reach the desired multiple. Here an example follows:

Fig. 4.7 – The number system of Linear B.

Fig. 4.8 – How to write a number.

Fig. 4.9 - Tablet from the Mycenaean House of the Oil Merchant, which is recording a quantity of wool to be treated for knitting or coloring, ordered by a young woman. National Museum of Athens inv. 7671. (Photo Merlini 2006). vii. A method to divide group of signs Scribes divided the signs of an inscription into groups using a small short vertical bar placed just above the line. The length of the groups varies from two to eight signs. As any other ancient script, Linear B employs signs, which are an outline notation that the reader has to fill in for himself. Indeed each sign of the inventory is not a strict representation of the sound, but merely a conventional notation. Therefore, an interpretation is needed to reconstruct the spoken form. Even the Mycenaean reader must have had to guess to understand the proper words from the signs he was reading on the tablet. This situation would be quite intolerable if Linear B was used for letters or legislation. However, it was used for lists and read only by the writer and his colleagues working in the same administration or archive. It is obvious from the tablets that Linear B was written in horizontal lines running from left to right. On most tablets, each line of text is written above a horizontal ruled line, and words are separated by a vertical stroke, a space, or a change in the height of the letters. 101

Linear B is considered by scholarship to be the latest of the writing systems and much later than the other two found on Crete. There is a quite general consensus that it mainly (but not completely) derived from Linear A in order to write a different, non-Minoan language deciphered by Ventris as an archaic form of Greek (forty-five Linear B syllabic signs have close equivalents in Linear A inventory). It is still unknown where, when, why, by whom, and under what circumstances this writing system was devised for such a purpose, although several suggestions have been proposed.

4.B.b The 56 signs of the Cypriote syllabary As in the case of Linear B, the Cypriote syllabary is well understood and documented. It was employed on Cyprus, on the eastern edge of the Greek world, to write Greek during the Bronze Age, from about 800 BC to about 200 BC. The inventory consists of 56 signs, each of which represents a vowel or different syllable starting with a consonant and finishing with a vowel. Structurally, the Cypriote syllabary consists of combinations of up to 12 initial consonants and 5 different vowels. Long and short vowels, double consonants, pre-consonant nasals were not indicated in the writing (Coulmas 1996: 106). Not all of the 60 possible consonant-vowel combinations are represented. Since the script could only represent syllables of the shape consonant + vowel (or vowels alone) and to accommodate...