Servicio Editorial

The first full set of inscriptions from Pylos was published as transcriptions in PT I. These inscriptions form the second largest group of written documents in the Mycenaean Greek script, Linear B. However, at that stage, they were referred to as Minoan scripts because of their similarity to the Knossos tablets. In PT I, Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. presented the whole of the available evidence from Pylos to decipherers rather than the few tablets that had been published hitherto. Nevertheless, these transcriptions represented only the basic essentials of the contents of the documents.

Whilst anticipating their final publication in the present form, Bennett had perforce omitted much that would have been of great value in interpreting the texts. Among the more serious omissions were those of photographs, drawings, and descriptions of the tablets, and a detailed account of their discovery. Also omitted were studies of the forms of the characters, and of their uses, of the formation and uses of sign groups, and so on. Yet there were great advantages arising from this early publication. By making the evidence available to all who were interested in the Linear B scripts, Bennett brought to bear the resources of archaeologists, philologists, historians, mathematicians, and cryptanalysts on the problem of decipherment, in the hope that, through their combined efforts, a more rapid advance to a solution might be expected.