Mycenaean Greek

Mycenaean Greek is the earliest recorded form of the Greek language, written in the Linear B syllabary on clay tablets from the palace archives of the Late Bronze Age, at Knossos, Pylos, Mycenae, Thebes, and Tiryns, from roughly 1450 to 1200 BCE. Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris, who showed against expectation that the script of the Aegean palaces recorded Greek, five centuries before Homer. The tablets are not literature but administration, inventories of livestock, grain, textiles, chariots, and offerings to the gods, and their place-names give the oldest attested forms of many Aegean toponyms.

The syllabary is a blunt instrument for Greek: it has signs only for open syllables, so it cannot write a final consonant or distinguish l from r, and it leaves consonant clusters and vowel length largely unmarked. A spelling such as ko-no-so therefore stands for Knōsos, and the vocalization given here is in part a scholarly reconstruction, which is why forms in this language are marked with the asterisk that flags a reconstructed pronunciation. The Mycenaeans left no name for their own tongue, and none is supplied here; the language is named, by modern convention, after the citadel of Mycenae. Forms follow the readings of Ventris and Chadwick’s Documents in Mycenaean Greek.

@misc{onomastikon-mycenaean-greek,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Mycenaean Greek},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/mycenaean-greek}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}