End of the Bronze Age in Greece
then, was that in much of the Peloponnese and in certain other
areas the palace class was displaced—mostly, perhaps, by at-
tacks from abroad, but in part also by revolution from below.
The commoners and their Common Greek dialect—Doric—
remained.
This thesis is based on the fact, noted by Ernst Risch in
1966, that the Linear B tablets give evidence (in the form of
certain scribal variants) that alongside what Risch called a
"normal" Mycenaean dialect there was also a "special" dialect
spoken at Knossos and Pylos. 8 Specifically, Risch called atten-
tion to three features (for example, in third declension nouns a
dative ending in -/ instead of -e) in which "special Mycenaean"
occasionally manifested itself in the tablets. To the three fea-
tures noted by Risch, Gregory Nagy added a fourth: unassibi-
lated ti, as opposed to the "normal Mycenaean" si. 9 Unassibi-
lated ti was in later times a North Greek characteristic, and
Chadwick proposed that the "special" dialect of several Myce-
naean scribes was in fact Common Greek, or what in historical
times would be called North Greek. Now, it is not unlikely
that Chadwick is correct in seeing the scribal variants as sur-
vivals of Common Greek, and it may be that among the My-
cenaean scribes a few retained some Common Greek usages that
distinguished their speech from the more "advanced" speech of
their fellows. But that is about as far as one can go. It is one
thing to say that on four points a few scribes in the Peloponnese
and Crete continued to adhere to Common Greek usage while
most of the scribes consistently used the more innovative South
Greek; it is quite another thing to say that through Mycenaean
times most people in the Peloponnese and Crete spoke Com-
- Risch, "Les differences dialectales dans le mycenien," in Proceed-
ings of the Cambridge Colloquium on Mycenaean Studies, ed. L. R. Palmer and
J. Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966), 150—57.
- G. Nagy, "On Dialectal Anomalies in Pylian Texts," Atti e memo-
rie delprimo Congresso Internationale di Micenologie 2 (Rome: Consiglio na-
zionale delle Ricerche, 1968), 667—76.
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