PY Ta 641

PY Ta 641
The Linear B tablet PY Ta 641, displayed in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens
Material	Clay
Size	approx. 15 cm × 4 cm × 1 cm (5.91 in × 1.57 in × 0.39 in)
Writing	Linear B script
Created	c. 1180 BCE
Discovered	1952 Palace of Nestor, Pylos, Greece.
Discovered by	Carl Blegen
Present location	National Archaeological Museum, Athens
Culture	Mycenaean Greece

PY Ta 641, sometimes known as the Tripod Tablet,^[1] is a Mycenaean clay tablet inscribed in Linear B, currently displayed in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.^[1] Discovered in the so-called "Archives Complex" of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Messenia in June 1952 by the American archaeologist Carl Blegen, it has been described as "probably the most famous tablet of Linear B".^[2]

The tablet catalogues tripods and other vessels used in ritual feasting. It was inscribed around 1180 BCE by a senior scribe working for the palatial administration at Pylos, known to scholarship as 'Hand 2' and possibly named Phugebris (Greek: Φυγέβρις). It is categorised as a palm-leaf tablet – a relatively small tablet used to record a single entry of information – and was probably intended to act as a short-term memory aid, perhaps before its information was transferred to a more permanent means of storage, such as papyrus.

Along with all other surviving tablets from Pylos, PY Ta 641 was accidentally fired when the Palace of Nestor was burned down around 1180 BCE, less than a year after the tablet's production. It has been used as evidence for the workings of the palatial administration, as well as about feasting in the Mycenaean world and the connections between Pylos and Crete in the Late Bronze Age.

The tablet was first published after Michael Ventris proposed, in June 1952, a decipherment of Linear B and that the Mycenaean language was a dialect of Greek. PY Ta 641 includes easily-recognised ideograms depicting the vessels it describes, which closely matched the translation of the associated text predicted by Ventris's decipherment. While the facts of its discovery and translation were disputed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, particularly by the Scottish classicist Arthur J. Beattie, the tablet provided an important early indication of the correctness of the decipherment, and contributed to its general acceptance among Anglophone scholars by the 1980s.