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Mycenaean Greek is the earliest attested form of the Greek language. It was spoken on the Greek mainland and Crete in Mycenaean Greece (16th to 12th centuries BC). The language is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script first attested on Crete before the 14th century BC. Most inscriptions are on clay tablets found in Knossos, in central Crete, as well as in Pylos, in the southwest of the Peloponnese. Other tablets have been found at Mycenae itself, Tiryns and Thebes and at Chania, in Western Crete.* The language is named after Mycenae, one of the major centres of Mycenaean Greece.
The tablets long remained undeciphered, and many languages were suggested for them, until Michael Ventris, building on the extensive work of Alice Kober, deciphered the script in 1952.
The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories. No prose narrative survives, much less myth or poetry. Still, much may be gleaned from these records about the people who produced them and about Mycenaean Greece, the period before the so-called Greek Dark Ages.
Mycenaean preserves some archaic Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Greek features not present in later ancient Greek:
The voiceless and voiced affricates and (marked with asterisks in the table above), are hypothesized to have been used in the pronunciation of words written with in transcriptions of the Mycenaean spelling system. Voiced developed from Pre-Greek clusters of a voiced dental or velar stop + *y ( *dy, *gy, *ɡʷy), or in certain instances from word-initial *y, and corresponds to ζ in the Greek alphabet. For example, the Mycenaean words 𐀕𐀿, 𐀵𐀟𐀼 (), pronounced , correspond to classical Greek μέζων, τράπεζα. Voiceless developed from Pre-Greek clusters of a voiceless or voiceless aspirated velar stop + *y (*ky, *kʰy, *kʷy, kʷʰy) and corresponds to -ττ- or -σσ- in Greek varieties written in the Greek alphabet. The exact pronunciation of these consonants in Mycenaean is uncertain.
There were at least five vowels , which could be both short and long.
As noted below, the syllabic Linear B script used to record Mycenaean is extremely defective script and distinguishes only the , the , the stop consonant , the affricate , the sibilant fricative , and (marginally) the glottal fricative . Voiced, voiceless and aspirate occlusives are all written with the same symbols except that stands for and for both and ). Both and are written ; is unwritten unless followed by .
The length of vowels and consonants is not notated. In most circumstances, the script is unable to notate a consonant not followed by a vowel. Either an extra vowel is inserted (often echoing the quality of the following vowel), or the consonant is omitted. (See above for more details.)
Thus, determining the actual pronunciation of written words is often difficult, and using a combination of the PIE etymology of a word, its form in later Greek and variations in spelling is necessary. Even so, for some words the pronunciation is not known exactly, especially when the meaning is unclear from context, or the word has no descendants in the later dialects.
Orthography simplifications therefore had to be made:
Verbs probably conjugate for 3 tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense; 3 aspects: perfect, perfective, imperfective; 3 numbers: singular, dual, plural; 4 grammatical mood: indicative mood, imperative mood, subjunctive mood, optative mood; 3 voices: active voice, middle voice, passive voice; 3 persons: first, second, third; , and .
The verbal augment is almost entirely absent from Mycenaean Greek with only one known exception, 𐀀𐀟𐀈𐀐, a-pe-do-ke (Pylos Fr 1184), but even that appears elsewhere without the augment, as 𐀀𐀢𐀈𐀐, a-pu-do-ke (Knossos Od 681). The augment is sometimes omitted in Homer.Hooker 1980:62
| +Modern translation by Wiseman (2010) of the first five lines of the Iliad into reconstructed Mycenaean Greek
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! Mycenaean Greek (Linear B script) ! Transliteration of Mycenaean Greek ! Homeric Greek (Greek alphabet: modern orthography) ! Transliteration of Homeric Greek | ||||
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The so-called Kafkania pebble has been claimed as the oldest known Mycenaean inscription, with a purported date to the 17th century BC. However, its authenticity is widely doubted, and most scholarly treatments of Linear B omit it from their corpora.Thomas G. Palaima, "OL Zh 1: QVOVSQVE TANDEM?" Minos 37–38 (2002–2003), pp. 373–385 full textHelena Tomas (2017) "Linear B Script and Linear B Administrative System: Different Patterns in Their Development" in P. Steele (ed.) Understanding Relations Between Scripts: The Aegean Writing Systems, pp. 57–68, n.2Anna Judson (2020) The Undeciphered Signs of Linear B, n.513
The earliest generally-accepted date for a Linear B tablet belongs to the tablets from the 'Room of the Chariot Tablets' at Knossos, which are believed to date to the LM II-LM IIIA period, between the last half of the 15th century BCE and the earliest years of the 14th.
Based on such variations, Ernst Risch (1966) postulated the existence of some dialects within Linear B.RISCH, Ernst (1966), Les differences dialectales dans le mycenien. CCMS pp. 150–160 The "Normal Mycenaean" would have been the standardized language of the tablets, and the "Special Mycenaean" represented some local vernacular dialect (or dialects) of the particular scribes producing the tablets.Lydia Baumbach (1980), A Doric Fifth Column? (PDF)
Thus, "a particular scribe, distinguished by his handwriting, reverted to the dialect of his everyday speech" and used the variant forms, such as the examples above.
It follows that after the collapse of Mycenaean Greece, while the standardized Mycenaean language was no longer used, the particular local dialects reflecting local vernacular speech would have continued, eventually producing the various Greek dialects of the historic period.
Such theories are also connected with the idea that the Mycenaean language constituted a type of a special koine representing the official language of the palace records and the ruling aristocracy. When the 'Mycenaean linguistic koine' fell into disuse after the fall of the palaces because the script was no longer used, the underlying dialects would have continued to develop in their own ways. That view was formulated by Antonin Bartonek.Bartoněk, Antonín, Greek dialectology after the decipherment of Linear B. Studia Mycenaea : proceedings of the Mycenaean symposium, Brno, 1966. Bartoněk, Antonín (editor). Vyd. 1. Brno: Universita J.E. Purkyně, 1968, pp. 37-51BARTONEK, A. 1966 'Mycenaean Koine reconsidered', Cambridge Colloquium on Mycenaean Studies' (CCMS) ed. by L. R. Palmer and John Chadwick, C.U.P. pp.95–103 Other linguists like Leonard Robert PalmerPalmer, L.R. (1980), The Greek Language, London. and Duhoux, Y. (1985), 'Mycénien et écriture grecque', in A. Morpurgo Davies and Y. Duhoux (eds.), Linear B: A 1984 Survey (Louvain-La-Neuve): 7–74 also support this view of the 'Mycenaean linguistic koine'.Stephen Colvin, 'The Greek koine and the logic of a standard language' , in M. Silk and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.) Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present (Ashgate 2009), 33–45 (The term 'Mycenaean koine' is also used by archaeologists to refer to the material culture of the region.) However, since the Linear B script does not indicate several possible dialectical features, such as the presence or absence of word-initial aspiration and the length of vowels, it is unsafe to extrapolate that Linear B texts were read as consistently as they were written.
The evidence for "Special Mycenaean" as a distinct dialect has, however, been challenged. Thompson argues that Risch's evidence does not meet the diagnostic criteria to reconstruct two dialects within Mycenaean.Thompson, R. (2006) 'Special vs. Normal Mycenaean Revisited.' Minos 37–38, 2002–2003 2006, 337–369. In particular, more recent paleographical study, not available to Risch, shows that no individual scribe consistently writes "Special Mycenaean" forms. This inconsistency makes the variation between "Normal Mycenaean" and "Special Mycenaean" unlikely to represent dialectical or sociolectical differences, as these would be expected to concentrate in individual speakers, which is not observed in the Linear B corpus.
Ancient Pamphylian Greek also shows some similarity to Arcadocypriot and to Mycenaean Greek.
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