Practice question · Multiple choice
Linear B tablets survive because a palace burned down. What does that accident tell us about what we can know?
Hints
- Unbaked clay was reused. Ask what happened to last year's tablets.
- Why would a palace fire produce a readable archive?
Show the answer
A. That the archive is one year's snapshot, preserved by fire
Why
The tablets were temporary records in unfired clay and the fire that ended the palace is what made them permanent, so we read a single administrative year by catastrophe. Option 4 assumes literary texts existed on clay; the evidence suggests the script was used for accounts and little else.
Practise The Bronze Age Aegean
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More questions on The Bronze Age Aegean
- What makes the systems-collapse thesis persuasive?
- The Greek alphabet spread quickly into non-administrative use partly because it belonged to no institution.
- Sort each factor in the 1200 BCE collapse.
- The Sea Peoples are best understood as the cause of the Late Bronze Age collapse.
- Complete the argument.
- Why was Ventris’s decipherment of Linear B as GREEK such a shock?
- Linear B tablets are almost entirely inventories, sheep, wheel-rims, rations. Why is that mundane content so…