Mycenaean is the most ancient attested form of the
Greek language, spoken on the Greek mainland and on
Crete in the
16th to 11th centuries BC, before the
Dorian invasion. It is preserved in inscriptions in
Linear B, a script invented on Crete before the 14th century BC. Most instances of these inscriptions are on clay tablets found in
Knossos in central
Crete, and in
Pylos in the southwest of the
Peloponnese. The language is named after
Mycenae, the first of the palaces to be excavated.
The tablets remained long undeciphered, and every conceivable language was suggested for them, until Michael Ventris deciphered the script in 1952 and by a preponderance of evidence proved the language to be an early form of Greek.
The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories. No prose narrative survives, much less myth or poetry. Still, much may be glimpsed from these records about the people who produced them, and about the Mycenaean period at the eve of the so-called Greek Dark Ages.
The Mycenaean language is preserved in Linear B writing, which consists of about 200 syllabic signs and logograms. Since Linear B was derived from Linear A, the script of an undeciphered Minoan language probably unrelated to Greek, it does not reflect fully the phonetics of Mycenaean. In essence, a limited number of syllabic signs must represent a much greater number of produced syllables, better represented phonetically by the letters of an alphabet. Orthographic simplifications therefore had to be made. The main ones are[1]
