Scribes and Their Hands

The tablets of Pages, Leaves and Labels were not written by everyone. Specialists can tell one writer from another by the way they drew the signs, the way a teacher can recognize a student's handwriting. Each writer is called a "hand".

Key idea

Each scribe's handwriting can be recognized and numbered. Scholars count about 66 hands at Knossos and 45 at Pylos. Writing seems to have been the work of a small group of palace scribes.

How hands are told apart

No scribe signed a tablet. Instead, scholars compare details: how a sign is drawn (one stroke or two, a loop or an angle), how big the signs are, how lines are spaced, which spelling a writer prefers. Emmett Bennett pioneered this study at Pylos. Each hand gets a number, and with it a pattern appears: one hand writes about sheep, another about bronze, another about land.

Scribes and tablets at the two biggest archives.
Site	Hands (about)	Tablets (about)
Knossos	66	4,000
Pylos	45	1,000

Ta 641 was written by one scribe. Notice the small line at the top: the scribe ran out of room and squeezed in the word for "legs".

Why it works

Why does it matter who wrote a tablet? Hands let scholars put scattered tablets back together, group records by office and see how the palace divided its work. If one hand wrote all the records about perfumed oil, that suggests one office, or one official, handled the oil business. Hands turn a heap of tablets into an organization.

Common mistake

Imagining many people could write. With only a few dozen hands at each palace, writing seems to have been a specialist palace skill, not something ordinary people did. Check: no Linear B letters or private notes have been found; the texts are palace business.

Hands also help with broken tablets. Many tablets reached museums in pieces. When two fragments share a hand, a subject and a clay color, they may be parts of one tablet, and scholars have joined many fragments this way. Each join can complete a word or a total that was missing.

Worked example: Hands per tablet

Pylos has about 1,000 tablets and about 45 hands. On average, about how many tablets per hand is that?

1,000 ÷ 45 is a little over 22.

Answer: About 22 tablets per hand (in fact some hands wrote far more than others).

Worked example: What a hand tells

Every tablet about chariot wheels at a palace is in the same hand. What might that suggest?

One writer handled one subject.

Answer: One scribe, or one office, was in charge of the chariot records.

Scribes and Their Hands

How hands are told apart

Practice

Builds on

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Sources and further reading