DĀMOS: Database of Mycenaean at Oslo
DAMOS (Database of Mycenaean at Oslo) is an annotated electronic corpus of all the published Mycenaean texts, the earliest (ca. XV-XII B.C.) written evidence of the Greek language, comprised of inscriptions in the Linear B syllabic script.
Mycenaean texts are generally administrative documents, dating from ca 1450 to 1150 B.C., written mostly on clay tablets in a syllabic script that we call Linear B. They have been found within the rests of the Mycenaean palaces both on Crete and mainland Greece. They amount to something less then 6000 documents, although many of them are brief or fragmentary texts.
Linear B is a syllabic script not related to the later Greek alphabets. It belongs to a family of writing systems used in the Aegean area in the II and I millennium B.C., of which only Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary of the I millennium have been satisfactorily deciphered. It is important to remark that although Linear B as a writing system seems to have functioned well as a tool for recording administrative information, it is not in fact a very efficient instrument for rendering the phonetic system of Greek, since it presents many inaccuracies and deficiencies in this regard. This fact, together with the nature of the texts, sometimes makes our interpretation of the texts and of their language quite uncertain. This, in turn, shows well how important the opportunity is, which an annotated electronic corpus offers, of systematically crossing all the information available at the different levels of analysis and within the whole of the extant Mycenaean texts.
The language of the documents, being the oldest attestation of an Indo-European language after Hittite and the only attestation of a Greek dialect in the II millennium B.C., presents several archaic and interesting linguistic features and poses some questions crucial for the history of the Greek language (and for the field of comparative Indo-European linguistics in general), which, especially because of the mentioned limitations of the content of the documents and the shortcomings of the writing system, are still in need of an appropriate, if not definitive, answer.
15.10.2019
Links to texts, images and data in LiBER (Mycenaea, Midea, Tiryns) have been added.
26.09.2019
References to Mycenaean documents in M. Del Freo, M. Perna (eds.) Manuale di Epigrafia Micenea have been added to the Basic Tablet Bibliography of the single tablets.
15.09.2019
Links to the Pylos images in CaLiBRA have been added.
13.09.2019
The Knossos tablets have been updated according to The Knossos Tablet, Sixth Edition, A Transliteration by José L. MELENA with the collaboration of Richard J. FIRTH, 2018:
Series, Subseries and Set changes,
Scribal hand changes,
New Joins.
Caveat: a few minor textual differences might have escaped. A revision of the texts is ongoing.
10.10.2018
The find places of the Pylos tablets have been updated according to Firth(2017).
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