Linear B

Linear B

Linear B is the deciphered Aegean syllabary — it writes Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of the language. pyaegean reads it through the same Script plugin model as Linear A: a sign inventory, transliteration to phonetics, a bridge into the Greek track, and the accounting reconciliation. Because Linear B is read, the work here is verifiable rather than exploratory.

import aegean
from aegean.scripts.linearb import word_to_phonetic, greek_reading

aegean.registered_scripts()              # ['cypriot', 'cyprominoan', 'greek', 'lineara', 'linearb']
word_to_phonetic("QA-SI-RE-U")           # 'kwasireu'  (gʷasileus, the ancestor of βασιλεύς)
greek_reading("PO-ME")                   # ('ποιμήν', 'shepherd')

Sign inventory

The inventory is built from the Unicode Character Database — the Linear B Syllabary and Ideograms blocks — so it is authoritative and freely licensed (see Data & Provenance). It holds 211 signs: 74 syllabograms (each with its phonetic value), 14 still-undeciphered symbols, and 123 ideograms/monograms for commodities (grain, wine, oil, people, livestock…). Every sign keeps its Bennett number (B008, B131) and its Unicode name.

from aegean.core.script import get_script

inv = get_script("linearb").sign_inventory
ka = next(s for s in inv if s.label == "KA")
ka.glyph, ka.phonetic, ka.attrs["bennett"]   # ('𐀏', 'ka', 'B077')

Transliteration → phonetics

word_to_phonetic converts a hyphenated transliteration to a phonetic Latin form, with the labiovelar (qa → kwa) and affricate (za → dza) values. The complex signs a2/a3/pu2 are kept distinct from a/pu.

word_to_phonetic("WA-NA-KA")   # 'wanaka'   (ϝάναξ, "king")
word_to_phonetic("TI-RI-PO-DE")# 'tiripode' (τρίποδε, "two tripods")
word_to_phonetic("WO-NO")      # 'wono'     (ϝοῖνος → οἶνος, "wine")

Bridge to Greek

Linear B is Greek, so a transliterated word resolves to its Classical Greek lemma and meaning. greek_reading returns (lemma, gloss) from a 150-entry lexicon of well-established equations — a hand-curated core layered with entries extracted from Wiktionary's Mycenaean Greek pages (via the kaikki.org dump, CC BY-SA): only entries whose etymology states the Ancient Greek equation are taken, so every bridge is source-attested rather than reconstructed. Pass the lemma on to the LSJ backend for the full entry.

from aegean.scripts.linearb import greek_reading, gloss

greek_reading("WA-NA-KA")   # ('ἄναξ', 'king, lord (wanax)')
greek_reading("TE-O")       # ('θεός', 'god')
gloss("DO-E-RO")            # 'slave, servant (male)'   (δοῦλος)

# with the LSJ lexicon active, get the full dictionary entry for the reading:
import aegean
aegean.greek.use_lsj()
lemma, _ = greek_reading("PO-ME")
aegean.greek.gloss(lemma)   # 'ποιμήν: herdsman, shepherd …'

Accounting

Linear B tablets are administrative records — names, commodity ideograms, and numerals, often with a to-so/to-sa (τόσος, "so much") total. The script-agnostic accounting engine reads them directly, using Linear B's total markers in place of Linear A's KU-RO.

from aegean.analysis import balance_check

corpus = aegean.load("linearb")
for doc in corpus:
    for chk in balance_check(doc):
        print(doc.id, chk.marker, chk.computed_sum, "==", chk.stated_total, chk.balances)

The reconciliation is heuristic — section boundaries are inferred — so a balance is evidence, not proof, exactly as for Linear A.

The corpus

The full DAMOS corpus — aegean.load("damos")

The most complete edition of the Mycenaean corpus is DAMOS (the Database of Mycenaean at Oslo, F. Aurora), published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. pyaegean hosts the DAMOS transliterations and core metadata as a fetched-on-demand release asset, so the whole corpus is one call away:

import aegean

corpus = aegean.load("damos")        # fetches ~a few MB to the cache on first use, then offline
len(corpus.documents)                # ~5,900 tablets: Knossos, Pylos, Thebes, Mycenae, Tiryns, …
doc = corpus.documents[0]
print(doc.id, "—", doc.meta.site)    # 'KN Fp(1) 1 + 31 (138) — Knossos'
print(doc.transcription)             # the DAMOS transliteration, verbatim

Each tablet is one Document: the transliteration is tokenised into words / numerals / logograms (using the DAMOS comma-and-slash word dividers), and the verbatim transliteration is kept in Document.transcription. Since v2, the DAMOS-curated context rides along in the metadata: the scribal hand (meta.scribe — 3,945 of the 5,932 documents carry one), the find context (meta.findspot, e.g. "PY, Room 8"), and the object class (meta.support: tablet / stirrup jar / nodule / label). That makes scribe-level work one-liners:

hand117 = corpus.filter(scribe="117")        # the most prolific Knossos hand: 684 tablets
vases = corpus.filter(support="stirrup jar") # the painted-vase inscriptions as a group

from aegean.analysis import keyness          # what does Hand 117 write about?
rows = keyness(hand117, [d for d in corpus.documents if d.meta.scribe != "117"])

The data is NonCommercial + ShareAlike — those obligations pass through to you; the corpus is hosted as a clearly-labeled CC BY-NC-SA release asset, fetched to your cache on demand, and never bundled inside the Apache-2.0 wheel. Cite DAMOS (Aurora 2015) in academic work. scripts/build_damos_corpus.py documents exactly how the asset is built from the DAMOS public API (joins, museum location, and inventory numbers are also in the JSON for those who read it directly).

The bundled sample — aegean.load("linearb")

For a zero-network default, pyaegean also bundles an 18-tablet illustrative sample — PY Ta 641 (the tablet that confirmed Ventris's decipherment) and PY Er 312 hand-curated, plus sixteen one-line excerpts from Pylos, Knossos, and Mycenae tablets taken from sourced quotations in Wiktionary's Mycenaean entries (each cites its tablet and carries a translation; CC BY-SA). These are excerpts to exercise the tools, not editions — use aegean.load("damos") above for the full corpus, or bring your own below.

From a LiBER selection (interim recipe). LiBER's interface exports a selection by copy-to-clipboard ("e.g., to be pasted into an Excel spreadsheet"). Your own copied selection — your use, under LiBER's terms; pyaegean fetches and re-hosts nothing — can be loaded through Corpus.from_records: save the paste as CSV with columns like id,site,text, then:

import csv

import aegean

with open("my-liber-selection.csv", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    records = [
        {"id": r["id"], "text": r["text"], "meta": {"site": r.get("site", "")}}
        for r in csv.DictReader(f)
    ]
corpus = aegean.Corpus.from_records(
    records, script_id="linearb",
    provenance=aegean.Provenance(
        source="My LiBER selection (manual export)",
        license="© CNR Edizioni — all rights reserved; personal research use",
        citation="LiBER — Linear B Electronic Resources (Del Freo & Di Filippo, CNR).",
    ),
)

Point pyaegean at your own licensed EpiDoc export (e.g. a DAMOS download) and it parses it locally, never re-hosting:

pip install "pyaegean[epidoc]"                 # the EpiDoc reader (lxml)
export PYAEGEAN_LINEARB_CORPUS=/path/to/damos   # a file or directory of EpiDoc XML

aegean.load("linearb")                          # now loads your corpus
# or explicitly:
from aegean.scripts.linearb import load_epidoc_corpus
load_epidoc_corpus("/path/to/damos")