Thebes Tablets

The Thebes tablets are clay tablets discovered at the city of Thebes, Greece, with inscriptions in the Mycenaean Greek language in the Linear B script. They belong to the Late Helladic IIIB context, contemporary with the finds at Pylos. A first group of 21 fragments were found in the 1963–64 campaign; a further nineteen tablets were found in 1970 and 1972. Using Near Eastern cylinder seals associated with the finds, the editors of the published corpus of the whole archive now date the destruction of the Kadmeion, the Mycenaean palace complex at Thebes, and therefore the writing of the tablets, some of which were still damp when they were unintentionally fired, to a time not long after 1225 BC. Chadwick identified three recognizable Hellenic divinities, Hera, Hermes and Potnia "the mistress", among the recipients of wool. He made out a case for ko-ma-we-te-ja, also attested at Pylos, as the name of a goddess.

Quite early, before the more recent discoveries, F.M. Ahl made the provocative suggestion concerning the phoinikeia grammata, the "Phoenician" or the "palm-leaf" (phoinix) letters: "Cadmus did bring writing to Thebes, but this writing was not the Phoenician alphabet, but Linear B".