Appendix: Mycenaean Tablets in Transcription

Summary

A number of tablets have been quoted or translated in the course of this book; here are a few more samples which will illustrate the nature of these documents. The text is given in Roman transcription of the Linear B; ideograms are represented by English words in small capitals, thus MAN. The details of the interpretation will be found in Documents in Mycenaean Greek, the reference to which will be found after the number of the tablet; PY = Pylos, KN = Knossos.

Following the text is an attempted reconstruction of the actual sound of the words used, as a Mycenaean scribe would have read them. Much in this is of course conjectural, and these transcripts are intended rather to enable those with some knowledge of Greek to see how we extract the meaning from the text. The Greek is written in the Roman alphabet, owing to the difficulty of representing certain of the sounds in the Greek alphabet. It is impossible to give a satisfactory rendering in classical Greek which is not a translation, since some words have different meanings and many have different forms.

The translation given here differs slightly from that printed in Documents, chiefly in suppressing indications of doubt. It must be stressed that in many cases alternative renderings are possible.