Scribes Treated as Criminals: A Note on the Study of Palm and Fingerprints on the Linear B Tablets of Knossos

The Linear B tablets written in Mycenaean Greek have been an invaluable source of information for the economy, administration, religion and bureaucracy of Mycenaean society. A great number of studies have been conducted on the relatively limited corpus: graphological analyses (of hand writing style), textual analyses, clay analyses, fingerprint analyses amongst others. This paper aims to use the fingerprint analysis and combine it with what we know about the various scribes (from the textual and graphological analyses) of the palace of Knossos. The fingerprints reveal who made which tablet, and we can thus see which scribes share tablets and work together. This then is coupled with the specialisation of the scribes. There is a very interesting correspondence between scribal collaborations and specialisations: scribes who exchange tablets before they were written, also work in the same part of the economy, or at least with comparable industries