KTÈMA 45 / 2020 A Note on the Linear A & B Ideogram AB 131/ VIN(um) ‘ Wine’ and Its Variants: References to Time Notation?
The Linear A and Linear B administrations seem not to have relied heavily on time-keeping practices in the redaction of their bureaucratic records, given that, apart from a few instances, 1 explicit time references are not straightforwardly expressed. The extant texts (mostly economic records in the form of clay tablets and sealings) are understood to have represented ephemeral documents which do not record information beyond a cyclical year. 2 In Linear B, this is inferable from references such as the adjectives ne-wo ‘ new / of this year’, za-we-te ‘ of this year’, and the syntagm to-to we-to ‘ this year’, as opposed to the adjective pe-ru-si-nu-wo ‘ of last year’, referred to the commodities recorded. The possibility is here entertained that, in specific contexts and for certain commodities, time references might have been expressed in a way different from phonetic writing, i. e. by means of semasiographic features. This could be the case for the Linear A and Linear
(1) By way of example, in Linear B the ideogram * 173/ LUNA, iconically representing a half-moon, stands for ‘ month’. Linear B texts also preserve the word for ‘ month’ (me-no) and a number of month-names, almost exclusively occurring in religious contexts (see esp. Hiller 2011 ; Jiménez Delgado 2013) : e. g. di-wi-jo-jo me-no ‘ month of Zeus’, de-u-ki-jo-jo me-no ‘ month of Deukos’, pa-ki-ja-ni-jo-jo me-no ‘ month of Sphagiānes’. (2) For a discussion of the Linear B administrative cycle see esp. Bennet 2001.
