Version 1.0, 17 February 2022

Version history:

1.0, 17 February 2022

About the script

Linear B, the script found on tablets in excavations of Knossos (Crete), Pylos and Mycenae, remained undeciphered for decades, until, in 1952, Michael Ventris (who profited from the preliminary analyses made by Alice Kober) managed to crack the code. Confirmation of the decipherment followed rapidly: Linear B had been used to write the oldest form of Greek know to us, Mycenaean Greek (15th-13th centuries BCE). Linear B consists of about 90 syllabograms, supplemented with about 165 logograms (or ‘ideograms’) and the so-called ‘Aegean numbers’, a numbering system more widely used in the Aegean area. There are word dividers (a small perpendicular line on the baseline). Linear B is exclusively written horizontally from left to right.