Before you can study a script, you need a way to talk about its signs. In Arthur Evans at Knossos, 1900 you saw that Evans kept most of the tablets to himself. When the Pylos tablets were published in 1951, the American scholar Emmett L. Bennett Jr. sorted every Linear B sign into a numbered list. Scholars still use his numbers.
Key idea
| Sign | Number | Value (known since 1952) |
|---|---|---|
| 𐀀 | *08 | a |
| 𐀅 | *01 | da |
| 𐀫 | *02 | ro |
| 𐀞 | *03 | pa |
| 𐀒 | *70 | ko |
| 𐀴 | *37 | ti |
Why number the signs?
Sorting signs is harder than it sounds. Two scribes may draw the same sign quite differently, and two different signs may look alike. Bennett compared thousands of examples to decide which shapes were variants of one sign and which were separate signs. Then he gave each a number. Now two scholars on different continents could write "*70" and mean exactly the same sign, with no guessing about its sound.
Why it works
Common mistake
Numbers today
The numbering was adopted by scholars as the standard in the 1960s and is still used, with additions. When you read a transliteration such as *18-to, the asterisk number tells you the scribe wrote a sign whose value is not agreed (Signs Still Unread). Logograms have numbers too: the man sign is *100, the horse *105, the tripod *201.
Worked example: Number to value
- *08 is the sign for the vowel a.
- a-mi-ni-so begins with that sign.
Answer: a
Worked example: How to write it
- An unread sign is written by its number with an asterisk.
- Signs are joined by hyphens.
Answer: *47-da