Linear B Syllabary Table

Linear B is the writing system of the Mycenaean Greek world: a syllabary (with additional ideograms, as its own infobox puts it) in use from about 1450 to 1200 BC, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Kydonia and Pylos. The tablets survive by accident of destruction - Arthur Evans dated the Knossos archive to a conflagration of about 1400 BC, “which would have baked and preserved the clay tablets” - and the earliest inscription from the mainland is a tablet from Iklaina dated between 1400 and 1350 BC. What the fire baked, this table lays out: all 88 named codepoints of Unicode block U+10000.

The decipherment is the great code-cracking story of the 20th century: Wikipedia records that Linear B “was deciphered in 1952 by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris”, explicitly building on the research of the American classicist Alice Kober, whose bridging “triplets” of inflected words proved the script recorded a language with grammatical endings. The language turned out to be Greek - Mycenaean Greek, written centuries before Homer. The tablets even preserve a royal word you can meet in epic: wa-na-ka, the Homeric and Classical ἄναξ (anax, “lord”), appears in tablet forms like wa-na-ka-te for the dative wanaktei.

Structurally the block is a grid of open syllables. Five pure vowel signs (a e i o u) are joined by 55 core consonant-vowel signs in twelve series - the d-, j-, k-, m-, n-, p-, q-, r-, s-, t-, w- and z-series - where the q-series writes the labialized velars (kʲ-sounds) and, uniquely among the series, the r-series has no l-twin because one series serves both liquids. Thirteen further syllable signs handle diphthongs and initial clusters (au, dwe, dwo, twe, two, nwa, pte) and homophonous extras (a2, a3, pu2, ra2, ra3, ro2, ta2) whose exact values are still debated, and fourteen “symbols” (B018-B089) close the block with functions scholars still argue over.

The digital afterlife is literal: Linear B was added to the Unicode Standard in April 2003 with version 4.0, and the Syllabary block is U+10000-1007F - the very first block of the Supplementary Plane, meaning this script owns the lowest codepoint of all the million supplementary characters. Sibling blocks follow: the Linear B Ideograms at U+10080-100FF and the Aegean Numbers at U+10100-1013F. The script descends from the still-undeciphered Linear A, and its sister system is the Cypro-Minoan syllabary of Cyprus.