spring haiku de printemps – the salamander = la salamandre the salamander on a fern with fiddleheads on a glazed vasela salamandre sur la fougère, les ornements d ’un vase émaillé Richard Vallance
Tag Archive: pottery
translation of Knossos tablet KN 778 Cj 01 by Rita Roberts:
Translation of Knossos tablet KN 712 M p 01 by Rita Roberts:
Translation of Knossos tablet KN 700 Mi 01 by Rita Roberts:
Translation of Linear B tablet KN 708a M h 02 by Rita Roberts:
Knossos fragment KN 874 M k 111 according to Sir Arthur Evans as translated by Rita Roberts:
Rita Roberts, translation of Linear B tablet KN 701 Mm 01:This is the first ever translation of a Linear B vessels or pottery fragment by Rita Roberts for her third, and final, year of university. In her third year, she is expected to master, first, Linear B tablets and fragments dealing with pottery and vessels, and secondly, tablet and fragments on textiles. The first category is the easier of the two to master, and so Rita will be concentrating on vessels and pottery tablets and fragments for the first quarter of her third year.
Rita Roberts’ translation of Knossos tablet KN 160a J j 11, dealing with wine, corrected:
Rita Roberts’ translation of Knossos tablet KN 160a J j 11, dealing with wine, corrected, is trickier than the previous one she has translated to fulfill the requirements for her second year of university, KN 906 Da 02, dealing with livestock. Because this tablet is damaged, truncated left and right, it can be more difficult to establish meaning for certain terms. But not necessarily so. Rita struggled gainfully with this tablet. And this is understandable. What determines everything in the decipherment of any tablet, Linear A or B, is CONTEXT. If we cannot determine what any given word(s) mean in the actual context of the tablet, we sometimes fail to grasp the meanings of these words. But in the end, everything falls into place, and a relatively convincing translation can be gleaned from it, as we see in the illustration above.
The only character which occasions real difficulty is the supersyllabogram PE, which usually stands for “seed(s)”. But if this the meaning to be extracted, it does not really make all that much sense, since grape seeds do not contribute much to wine, only the grapes do. The only explanation I can muster here is this: the grape seeds had to be extracted, i.e. removed, from the grapes to produce the wine. That makes sense. Finally, we find the ideogram for “olive oil” on this tablet, but how olive oil mixes with wine is a mystery to me, unless the olive oil is being served with bread along with the wine. But there is no mention of bread on this tablet. So some issues remain unresolved.
Richard