Mycenaean Greek

This article is about the Greek language as spoken in the Late Bronze Age. For the later dialect used in Achaea and the Peloponnese, see Achaean Doric Greek.
Mycenaean Greek
Native toMycenean Greece
RegionSouthern Balkans/Crete
Era16th–12th century BC
Linear B
Language codes
ISO 639-3gmy
gmy
Glottologmyce1242
Map of Greece as described in Homer's Iliad. The geographical data is believed to refer primarily to Bronze Age Greece, when Mycenaean Greek would have been spoken, and so can be used as an estimator of the range.
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This article contains text in the Linear B syllabic script and characters used to write reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.

Mycenaean Greek is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, on the Greek mainland and Crete in Mycenaean Greece (16th to 12th centuries BC), before the hypothesised Dorian invasion, often cited as the terminus ad quem for the introduction of the Greek language to Greece.[citation needed] 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.[1] 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.[2]

The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories. No prose narrative survives, much less myth or poetry.[3] 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.

  1. ^ *Chadwick, John (1976). The Mycenaean World. Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-29037-6.
  2. ^ "Cracking the code: the decipherment of Linear B 60 years on". University of Cambridge. 15 January 2023.
  3. ^ Cartledge, Paul (27 October 2011). Ancient Greece: A Very Short Introduction (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 17. ISBN 978-0-19-960134-9.