At the beginning of the 20th century, during the excavation of the palace of Knossos, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans found a large number of archival documents written in three different scripts. In his book Scripta Minoa I (Oxford 1909) he called these scripts “Cretan Hieroglyphic”, “Linear A”, and “Linear B”, where the term linear alluded to the stylized and cursive shape of the signs compared to the more decorative and calligraphic form of the Cretan Hieroglyphics. Subsequently, Linear B texts were brought to light also in various palatial sites of mainland Greece, including Pylos and Mycenae.

The decipherment of Linear B, which is a logo-syllabic script, is due to the British architect Michael Ventris. Based on the study of sign frequencies and alternations (made possible by the work of Emmett Bennett), Ventris gradually developed a phonetic grid, until, in his last work note, dated 1 June 1952, moving from some observations previously made by Alice Kober, he suggested the possibility that Linear B was used to write Greek.

NOTE 20. Are the Knossos and Pylos tablets written in Greek ?
  With the publication of the Knossos tablets in Scripta Minoa volume II, and with the promise of Dr Bennett's revised Index, we are in a position to begin a detailed analysis of the whole Linear B material under its various aspects. [...] The note wich follows is in the nature of a frivolous digression, and is not intended to prejudice that analysis.

A month later, Ventris publicly announced the results of his decipherment in a BBC radio broadcast.

Shortly afterwards he came into contact with John Chadwick, an ancient Greek specialist from Cambridge, who collaborated with him to write the founding article of Mycenaean epigraphy, “Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives” (Journal of Hellenic Studies 1953) and the first reference book on Linear B, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge 1956).

We currently possess about 6,000 Linear B inscriptions, mostly from palatial contexts dating from the 14th-13th centuries BC. The vast majority of them are clay tablets of economic content.


A CNR project by the Institute of Heritage Science and the Institute for Studies on the Mediterranean


Maurizio Del Freo  /  Editor
Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale (CNR-ISPC)
Francesco Di Filippo  /  Software developer
Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo (CNR-ISMed)
Françoise Rougemont  /  Editorial assistant
CNRS, UMR 7041 ArScAn, Nanterre

The Project

The Linear B Electronic Resources (LiBER) project is sponsored by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and has been conceived and developed by Maurizio Del Freo (CNR-ISPC) and Francesco Di Filippo (CNR-ISMed) with the collaboration of Françoise Rougemont (CNRS UMR 7041 ArScAn). The ultimate goal of the project is to create a complete digital edition of the Linear B documents, equipped with a new search engine specifically designed for logosyllabic scripts as well as Web-GIS functionalities for the spatial representation of the documents.

Currently, the database contains all the Linear B texts except the archival documents from Agios Vasileios and Thebes.

The documents are reproduced from the most recent print editions and are regularly updated as new information on classifications, readings, joins, scribal hands, findspots, or chronologies becomes available.

Each document appears on screen as in its original printed layout, thus respecting both the standard transcription rules (special characters, upper and lower case, italics, superscripts, subscripts, etc.) and the spatial arrangement of the text elements of the original documents (number of spaces between signs, lacunae, etc.). Each document is provided with a transcription, one or more photographs, and a critical apparatus. Where available, cross-references to the PA-I-TO Project's RTI photos (Sapienza Università di Roma, Università IULM di Milano, Herakleion Archaeological Museum) are provided.

The search engine allows users to filter and combine documents based on textual, palaeographic, topographical and chronological criteria. It also supports “regular expressions”, and other types of queries based on contiguity and co-occurrence of textual elements. The results of the queries are indexed according to the rules commonly used for Linear B indexes, and can be displayed either as lists of documents or as findspots on an interactive map.

LiBER v.2 in numbers:



Materials

All document images are reproduced with the kind permission of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and are intended for personal, non-profit use only. The rights of the depicted documents belong to the Hellenic Ministry of Culture (Greek Law 3028/2002).

Terms of use

Texts are reproduced with the kind permission of their respective authors. Their limited re-use in scholarly works is permitted according to standard academic practice. To cite a Linear B document, please use the "Cite this document" box at the bottom of the relevant page.

Development

Both text encoding and search engine have been adapted to Linear B from the Progetto Sinleqiunnini, a Document Management System developed by Francesco Di Filippo, already employed for the cuneiform archives from Ebla and Emar.

Cite this Project
Del Freo, M., Di Filippo, F., Rougemont, F. (2024). Linear B Electronic Resources (LiBER). Roma: CNR Edizioni. ISBN: 978-88-8080-690-5. Available at: https://liber.cnr.it. (Accessed: ).
@book{liber_2024,
                                address = {Roma},
                                title = {Linear {B} {Electronic} {Resources} ({LiBER})},
                                isbn = {978-88-8080-690-5},
                                shorttitle = {{LiBER}},
                                url = {https://liber.cnr.it},
                                language = {en},
                                publisher = {CNR Edizioni},
                                author = {Del Freo, Maurizio and Di Filippo, Francesco and Rougemont, Françoise},
                                year = {2024},
                                }