History

Linear B, the ethnic object in black variation. Tribal art, natural design, penmanship, cosmetics. The name that I chose to seemingly give to the shop sheltering such different products is not a chance outcome. It refers to my training as a linguist and the interest which I always carried to the most primitive expression of the oral or written language and with all its forms of testimonies. It held me with heart to create a place which can testify, in its manner, of my interest for these various fields and to describe my personal pathway .

The Linear B is an antiquated syllabic writing (15th - 12th century before JC) of the Greek language discovered in the island of Peak, consisted of ideograms (90 signs) representing men, animals, objects, products and numerical signs , whose aspect is typically Greek, but which also borrows from the Semitic languages. The principal difference existing between Linear B and the Cretan writings is on the level of the execution of the signs. The signs of Linear B seem more advanced, using much more the curved forms. And their execution is intended to be more meticulous. This form of writing, conceived to write not only accounting records but also diplomatic and literature documents, is much more cursive, detailed and esthetical than Linear A having preceded it. It is this cursive aspect of the Linear B which tends to show that it was not created only to write the Greek, but to write on other supports used at the time as well, namely clay, of which the principal advantage resided in the fact of being able to be re-used, the tablets being able to be reduced to powder, humidified and reused many times. Alas, the new supports succeeding to clay did not survive time proof and could not be preserved. The most conclusive explanation to this disappearance is that these documents had been written on supports such as wood, leather or papyrus. We know that the accounting records do not have a great resistance to the action of time. It is thus probable that the texts intended for a greater duration of existence were written on materials which, for a mycenian scribe could seem much more robust, as wood or leather. However, in fact the clay tablets of the Aegean world reached us, this is because of the flames which destroyed the Cretan palates and mycenian , cooking and thus solidifying the clay tablets, but destroying the documents out of wooden or leather, which precisely were dedicated to last .

Linear B, penmanship and tribal art

As for the writing itself, it is perhaps by studying the assumption of one writing support different from clay that one may explain the cursive aspect of linear B. Sure it existed already at the time of linear A  inscriptions painted with ink using a brush or of a feather. And we know that the painted writing has an aspect naturally more fine than a writing incised like that used for the accounting tablets. But it is with the appearance of linear B that one counts many examples of inscriptions painted, primarily on pottery, and that one finds at the same time on the Greek continent and in Crete . The external differences that linear B compared to the other linear writings  seem not to come from the need to apply a linear writing to the Greek language, but is explained by the need for using a support different from that mainly used at the time minoenne time, clay .

Even the similarity that one may perceive between a line of ethnic jewels, a range of natural cosmetics and penmanship Arab texts remains purely visual, I liked to imagine a link between the fine writing of linear B, near in that to penmanship, the syllabograms evoking singularly the tribal patterns that one finds it on a number of Berber jewels and decorative henna tattoos, and finally  the materials which were used as supports for the expression of  primitive graphics and that linear B declines in all the tones born from the rough ground.

syllabogrammes du linéaire B