Mycenaean is the most ancient known form of the Greek language, spoken in Mycenae and on Crete in the 16th to 11th centuries BC, before the Dorian invasion. It is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script invented on Crete in the 14th century BC. Most inscriptions of these inscriptions are on clay tablets found in Mycenae and in Knossos.

The tablets remained long undeciphered, and every conceivable language was suggested for them, until Michael Ventris deciphered the script in 1952 and uncontestably proved the language to be an early form of Greek.

The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories. No prose narrative survives, much less myth or poetry. Still, much may be glimpsed from these records about the people who produced them, and about the Mycenaean period at the eve of the so-called Greek Dark Ages.

Phonology and orthography

Linear B consists of about 200 syllabic signs and logograms. As it was inherited from Linear A, the script of the undeciphered Minoan language, it does not reflect fully the phonetics of Mycenaean: consonant clusters must be dissolved orthographically, and r and l are not disambiguated, nor is there a disambiguation for the greek phonological categories of voiced/unvoiced (excepting dentals d, t) and aspirated/unaspirated; syllable-final l, m, n, r, s are omitted.

The script differentiates five vowel qualities, a, e, i, o, u, the semi-vowels w and j (also transcribed as y),, three liquids, m, n, r and seven occlusives, d, k, p, q, s, t, z (the latter may represent a cluster zd corresponding to greek Zeta).

For example, *khrusos 'gold' would be spelled as ku-ru-so, or *gwous 'cow' as qo-u.

Corpus

The Mycenaean corpus consists of some 6000 tablets, and may be increased by future finds. The tablets are classified by the location of their excavation.

• KN Knossos: ca. 4360 tablets
• PY Pylos : 1087 tablets
• TH Thebes (mycenaean /Tegway/): 99 tablets + 238 published in 2002.
• MY Mycenae: 73 tablets
• TI Tiryns: 27 tablets.
• KH Chania: 4 tablets
• another 170 inscriptions in Linear B were found on vessels.

The publication of the Thebes tablets (L. Godart and A. Sacconi, 2002) was long anticipated, and their actual content was rather disappointing compared to what had been hinted at by the editors in the previous years.

In fiction

Mycenaean is spoken by the characters in Philip José Farmer's World of Tiers series.