Exploring the World of Linear B

Linear B, a script that was used during the Bronze Age for writing in Mycenean Greek, was the subject of an interactive workshop organized by PhD candidate Emily Tour last year. Led jointly by Dr Anna Judson from Durham University (online) and Emily Tour (on site), the workshop offered participants the opportunity to experiment with constructing their own Linear B tablets. Master’s candidate Ruby Mackle looks back on the workshop in this interview with Emily Tour.

Linear B, an ancient script used between the 15th and 12th centuries BC by the Mycenaeans, presented a fascinating mystery for many archaeologists, linguists, and classicists through the 20th century. The first examples of it were discovered in the early 1900s, but its meaning remained unknown for decades, before it was deciphered in the 1950s.

The decoding of Linear B shed light on previously unknown aspects of Mycenaean culture and allowed those studying this civilization a closer insight into the lives and world of the people who inhabited it. Whilst the script was primarily used for accounting purposes by Mycenaean palace bureaucrats, Linear B texts offer more than just an understanding of tax records. They also shed light on broader topics, such as socio-political structures and religion. No longer a mystery, Linear B remains one of the most intriguing and interesting ways in which scholars study the ancient world.

In the workshop hosted by SHAPS in 2024, Linear B was approached through the method of experimental archaeology. Experimental archaeology is a form of study where researchers try to replicate the creation or use of items in the past. This allows for a more holistic understanding of how people in the past would have experienced these objects and the world around them. Anna Judson is an enthusiastic practitioner of experimental archaeology and she began the workshop by discussing her own experiences in this field.

During a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the British School at Athens, Dr Judson conducted a series of experiments making Linear B tablets, in order to test out different materials, ideas and processes relating to their production, as well as considerations regarding their storage and transport. As part of one experiment, she packed some recently created tablets in her luggage on a trip around Europe, in order to test their durability and suitability for longer-distance transport. This hands-on approach, apart from giving her great stories and photos, allowed a real-life proxy of how these tablets might have been formed, modified, and used. She has since published these findings and produced an instructional video and worksheet on how to create Linear B tablets, which formed the basis of this workshop.

Following a general introduction to the Mycenaeans, Linear B and Dr Judson’s previous experiments, workshop participants were then given the opportunity to have a go at making their own tablets out of clay, straw, and string. Using a combination of Linear B symbols, some representing entire words (logograms) and others representing syllables (syllabograms), they were able to spell out names, words, and messages on the clay tablets. Emily Tour facilitated everything expertly, and the event was an excellent combination of the entertaining and the educational. I sat down with Emily for a conversation about her research and her experience organizing and running the workshop.

What are your research interests generally?

I’m doing my PhD at the University of Melbourne. My research interests are generally focused on administration during the Bronze Age in mainland Greece and Crete, so the time of the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures.

More specifically, I’m looking at various types of documents and devices that were used by the elite administrations at this time – so not only clay tablets inscribed with Linear A or Linear B, but also other supplementary devices used to manage economic transactions, such as sealings, labels, dockets, receipts, and so on.

I’m interested in the physicality of these objects – their shape and size, what they were made of, who created them, how they were constructed, what they were used to seal and label and record. This type of evidence can provide important information on how these ancient economies and administrations were run, how scribes operated at the time, whether there were changes in bureaucratic practices across time periods (say between the Minoans and the Mycenaeans) – that sort of thing.

What got you initially interested in Linear B and gave you the idea for this workshop?

Back in 2017 during a graduate diploma at the University of Melbourne, I ended up taking a subject on ancient Greek history and archaeology by chance when one of my other subjects was cancelled. I’ve always had an interest in ancient administration, but from a Mesopotamian perspective, so more looking at cylinder seals and cuneiform [an ancient script used in the Near East between 3000 BC until the first century AD].

Studying the Bronze Age Aegean opened up this whole new world of administration I’d known nothing about previously. I was fascinated by everything about it, from the beautiful seal designs to the different scripts that were used throughout the period, and the complex array of administrative devices they employed, beyond just the standard tablets or object sealings that other ancient bureaucracies tended to stick to.

In terms of Linear B and Mycenaean culture more specifically, I was really intrigued by the challenge of studying this period, given the lack of written information we have, as Linear B texts are really just dry accounting records. There’s no literature, no religious texts, no personal letters.

But researchers looking at the Mycenaeans have done some amazing work to glean as much information as possible from a very limited data set. They’re not just studying the texts in minute detail; they’re also looking at all aspects of the tablets and other devices, right down to trying to identify the handwriting or fingerprints of individual scribes, to see what extra clues that can give us about the working of the Mycenaean economy… It’s a bit like detective work, and I think it’s resulting in some really innovative research.

Along the way I came across Anna Judson’s work, and particularly her experiments with tablet-making, and I started to think about how that might be relevant to my own PhD research.

While I’m less interested in tablets, and more in the materiality of other types of administrative devices, I felt like I could still apply many of the same principles and learn a lot from Anna’s approach. So, I thought, why not organize a tablet-making workshop and share this knowledge with others as well? I reached out to Anna to see if she’d be interested in running the workshop for a group at the University of Melbourne, which she very kindly agreed to. We decided, since she was based in the UK, that we’d go for a hybrid approach, with Anna delivering the content via Zoom, whilst I facilitated the session in person, setting up the room, providing the clay and other materials for the tablet making, and so on. And I think it was a great format in the end.

How did you find the workshop on the night? Were you pleased with the turnout and participation?

The turnout was so much bigger than I expected – we even had a waiting list! And there were also some people who couldn’t make it in person, but were still keen to participate, so they bought their own clay and joined in via Zoom. I was really thrilled with the level of interest, particularly for what is a rather niche topic, and everyone who came along was so enthusiastic and engaged.

I think the way Anna ran it was great — she provided some really interesting background context, but also left plenty of time for people to play with clay, which was really the main event for the night. Hopefully we’ve got lots of people interested in Linear B who hadn’t really come across it before.

What were your highlights from the event?

The overall highlight was how much everyone enjoyed the workshop – we almost had to run overtime because everyone was just having too much fun!

Personally, I got a lot out of it in terms of thinking about the process of tablet making, some of the different techniques that were used, and the types of things tablets can tell us that we don’t automatically think of when we’re just looking at them in books, or reading inscriptions.

Something that I didn’t really appreciate before was how some Mycenaean administrators put string in the tablets when they were forming them. I might have read about this once or twice, but never really dwelt much about the significance of it. It was only when Anna was talking about her experiments with this aspect of tablet-making, and I was constructing a tablet with my own hands, that I really started thinking about the ‘why’ of it. For the record, we don’t actually know why, but one of the hypotheses that Anna was able to test out in her research was whether the string helped tablets stay together if they became fragmented, which might mean that some tablets were actually intended for long-distance travel between sites!

I hope I’m able to feed some of these learnings about what hands-on experimentation can tell us into my own research.

Do you feel like the experimental archaeology approach was better for this kind of topic than a traditional lecture-style presentation? Did certain aspects work especially well?

I think it worked really well. It gave people the ability to try out various techniques and get an appreciation for specific aspects of tablet construction, like how using a different kind of stylus affects things, how rolling or preparing tablets in different ways changes the overall shape of the tablet, and how you can leave physical impressions of yourself on the devices too, in the form of fingerprints and palmprints.

I think those kinds of experiences give you really good clues about what to look at when you are examining these objects in museums, for example. You don’t really get that out of a regular lecture.

Do you have any plans for another, similar event?

I do want to have a look at making some of the other types of administrative devices that were used in the Bronze Age Aegean, as that obviously aligns more closely with my own interests. I would love to run a little workshop around that myself. It would be cool to get away from writing a bit and instead look at some of the different types of clay labels, dockets, and receipts that were sealed – ideally this would involve 3D printing some ancient seals that participants can have a play around with.

And I know there is a pretty strong little community of students at the University who are really interested in cuneiform – I am as well – so I’d love to help run a cuneiform tablet-making session at some point.

Thinking about experimental archaeology in general, I think at the University of Melbourne we have a really good focus on Object Based Learning (OBL), and it’s great that this allows us to get up close to the objects. However, handling artefacts in a controlled setting is very different from being able to experiment with the materials and techniques that were used to make them.

I think both OBL and experimental research were combined really well recently, during an amazing palaeography workshop organised by our own Dr Sarah Corrigan. This involved several presenters from different areas of study talking about a range of different scripts and palaeographic practices, from Ancient Greece right through until Elizabethan times.

During the workshop, we got to inspect some wonderful manuscripts from the University of Melbourne’s collection in the OBL labs, as well as try out writing the different scripts we were learning about and even practising a bit of illumination work. Incorporating these different elements gave a hands-on, practical appreciation that you would never get from a traditional lecture, and I think experimentation is something we could really introduce more widely into our Ancient World Studies program.