3,300-Year-Old Linear B Tablet Fragment Found at Iklaina, Greece: Barely Half an Inch Tall, It May Rewrite How the Mycenaean State Began
The University of Missouri-St. Louis reported on November 14 that archaeologist Michael Cosmopoulos and his team discovered a tiny clay tablet fragment inscribed in Linear B more than 3,300 years ago at Iklaina, a major Bronze Age site in southwestern Greece. The fragment is barely half an inch tall. Cosmopoulos gave the first detailed public presentation of the discovery this week in a lecture titled Rewriting the History of Mycenaean Messenia: Iklaina and the Creation of the Kingdom of Pylos, at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Linear B is the earliest known form of written Greek. In the Mycenaean world, writing was a tool of government, used to record people, land, taxes and goods. The fragment was found in 2025 during an excavation led by Cosmopoulos, a Curators' Distinguished Professor at UMSL. It is the second tablet found at Iklaina, after the first was discovered in 2010. The two tablets provide evidence of local administrative recordkeeping at Iklaina at a time when, under the traditional view, the region was already governed from the Palace of Nestor.
Cosmopoulos said the discovery adds to growing evidence that the Kingdom of Pylos emerged through the consolidation of smaller, independent states towards the end of the Late Bronze Age, rather than developing under a single dominant center from the beginning. Earlier excavations at Iklaina uncovered monumental Cyclopean architecture, wall paintings and elaborate infrastructure, and the team believes the city was once the capital of an independent state before it was annexed by the expanding Kingdom of Pylos around the middle of the 13th century BC.
Source: University of Missouri-St. Louis
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图中是一块刻有线形文字B的迈锡尼泥板标本，与伊克莱纳新公布残片同属线形文字B泥板文物。 Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
