In 2019 Richard Janko published a long article “Amber inscribed in Linear B from Bernstorf in Bavaria: New Light on the Mycenaean Kingdom of Pylos” in Bavarian Studies in History and Culture; here’s the abstract:
In 2000 the extensive fortified citadel of Bernstorf near Munich in Germany, which burned down in or after c. 1320 BC and had already yielded some gold regalia of rather Aegean appearance, produced two amber objects seemingly inscribed in Linear B. The authenticity of these objects has been questioned, on grounds that are as yet insufficient. A new reading suggests links with a place called *Ti-nwa-to, the existence of which is attested by the Mycenaean archives at Pylos and possibly at Knossos. Women from this place worked at both palatial centers as weavers, but it also had a wealthy ‘governor’. An analysis of the Pylos tablets suggests that this place was in western Arcadia. This material sheds light on long-distance connections in Mycenaean times.
It starts with a lengthy description of the finds and their authenticity, continues with “Reactions to the discoveries” (“the finds at Bernstorf were too outlandish and remote for them to have attracted much notice from scholars of the Aegean Bronze Age, a field which has seen some notorious forgeries and hoaxes”), and proceeds to Janko’s own “fresh approach,” which involves interpreting the inscription “??? pa-nwa-ti” as ti-nwa-to, comparing it to other forms attested in the Linear B tablets, and concluding that it represents a place in the Western Peloponnese. There follows a detailed discussion of possible locations and implications, with “some hypotheses”:
If the amber from Bernstorf was incised with Linear B in the western Peloponnese, how did it reach Upper Bavaria, and why? Even in the Middle Bronze Age, valuable artifacts could travel vast distances. One can only offer hypotheses, since it is not clear on what basis we could decide between them, but at least only a limited number of them are available; considering them will shed light on several aspects of Mycenaean long-distance relations. If these objects are genuinely from Mycenaean Greece, they must either have been traded by Mycenaeans, taken from them by force, or paid by them for services of some kind, the most obvious of which is service in a force of mercenaries. They could then of course have been traded great distances, as far as Bernstorf, by other intermediaries. […] The whole story may never be known, but the discovery of Linear B in Upper Bavaria opens a surprising new window onto the Mycenaeans and their far-flung connections.
This kind of thing is extraordinarily interesting in theory, but I can’t help but feel that it’s an awful lot to make of a few scratches on a piece of amber. I’ll be curious to see what others think.
When reading the name of the article, I thought that the amber might have come from Bernsdorf (cf. German Bernstein ‘amber’) and that a speaker of Linear B had lived there, but later realized that the author had something else in mind.
Where is the Bernsdorf in question? Two places so called are in Saxony and two in the Czech Republic. Where exactly is the one in Upper Bavaria?
It’s Bernstorf, not Bernsdorf; from the first sentence of the abstract I quoted: “In 2000 the extensive fortified citadel of Bernstorf near Munich in Germany…”
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bernstorf,+85402+Kranzberg,+Germany/@48.4189945,11.6194809,17z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x479e69ac14f7d833:0x1fbb003ed4f29abd
Right next to a beer store, I see.
Linear Beer is a technique for getting through a sixpack of clay tablets. You are not required to work from left to right. Neglect of this fact has hampered understanding of the social context.
Biernstorf?
I remember being warned about that stuff when I was young. Stay away from Linear Beer — it’ll go straight through ya.
The authenticity of these objects has been questioned, on grounds that are as yet insufficient.
That seems a funny way to put it — indeed I’m wondering what it is they’re trying to put(?) Is this a dodgy translation?
I get it that it would be too easy to just declare “fake!”. So I guess you’d need evidence of fakery. What would be ‘sufficient’ evidence?
Some archaeological and epigraphic finds are so startling that they seem to make no sense.
Yes: it seems just as unsupportable to say ‘Not sufficient evidence for fakery, therefore genuine.’
There’s been plenty of despoliation and disturbance of the site over ~3 millennia. I would have thought plenty of opportunities to insert a fake. (Who would do that or why? — is a reasonable challenge.)
Two of the amber pieces were found in the spoil after an allegedly ‘unproductive’ area was attacked with a mechanical digger. I guess we could carbon-date the amber. The incisions could have been made any time(?)
Most of the article seems concerned to reject the hypothetical imputation that it was the 1992 amateur archaeologist finders who ‘planted’ the amber. I don’t see so much diligence on rejecting a hypothesis that the fakery was Mediaeval or before. (Who knew of Linear B, or of similar markings? — although not all of the markings correspond to any Linear B characters.)
Oh, and to see the markings as Linear B needs a ‘sinistroverse’ reading. There’s a 20 Guinea word for you.
Interpreting the markings to some Hellenic location needs a whole series of exceptional explanations.
Yeah, the whole article seemed to constitute a series of exceptional explanations.
I don’t have time to read the article, but:
No. The amber is like 30 million years old. After ten half-lives (rule of thumb) nothing is left, and in the case of carbon-14 that’s not much over 50,000 years; objects a bit over 60,000 years in age have been successfully carbon-dated, but that’s it. The inscription can’t be dated unless maybe if there’s ink in it, for example.
That brings me to another topic, though: amber in premodern Europe, including Mycenaean Greece, is basically guaranteed to come from the Baltic Sea. Long-distance trade existed, and it must have gone in both directions.
No, it’s clearly intended to mean that the burden of evidence is on those who say it’s a fake.
“Nobody” seems to be a very good guess. If it’s a deliberate forgery, it has to be modern.
Again, however, I can’t now take a look and form an opinion on whether the scratches are actually random. Roman-age scratches on bones in a river in Germany were once interpreted as runes…
German Bernstein ‘amber’
AFAIK, only Swedish has bernsten, while all the other sister languages have raf/rav:
raf
Icelandic
Etymology
From Old Norse rafr, from Proto-Germanic *rabaz from the verb *rebaną (“to move, stir”). Possibly related to *rēpō, from *h₁reh₁p- (compare Latvian rãpât, Latvian râpt, Middle High German reben (“to move, stir, blend”), Middle High German rebe (“offshoot, bud”)). Confer with Latin serpō.
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /raːv/
Rhymes: -aːv
Noun
raf n (genitive singular rafs, nominative plural röf)
1. amber
Why would a noun for ‘amber’ come from a verb meaning “to move, stir”?
Because amber is a solidified tree resin, so it begins by oozing slowly from the bark?
Move, stir or blend. Amber is a blend of insect and resin. Blended, not stirred.
Some archaeological and epigraphic finds are so startling that they seem to make no sense. With no knowledge of the Vikings, we would not expect to discern Norse runes on a stone lion in the Piraeus or discover Arab dirhams in Dublin.
This seems like a strange premise to me. This kind of find (an object bearing the marks of a geographically distant culture) happens all the dang time. Sometimes we have independent evidence of the people who brought the item, sometimes we don’t. I don’t think there are any actual archaeologists to whom long-distance trade would “make no sense.”
The article even says that the amber in question came from the Baltic. But I guess the headline “Amber with Linear B inscription found midway between place that exported amber and place that both imported amber and used Linear B” would be less exciting.
Heh. Good point.
That said, most of the article seems to take the existence of the inscribed amber as fairly unremarkable, and is more interested in discussing concrete questions of what the inscription means and the specific cultural context that brought it to Bavaria. I’m guessing some of the more hyperbolic language is a result of the author trying to explain the significance of the find and perhaps overshooting the mark.
Yes, and while that can lead to sniping, I prefer it to the usual academic approach of “I’m going to discuss this in as rebarbative a manner as possible, hedging my bets and covering my ass and hoping that no one but the three other people studying the exact same thing will ever make it to the end.”
Why would a noun for ‘amber’ come from a verb meaning “to move, stir”?
From link 1 there:
Semantically based on the magnetic power of amber
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.
Cf. how ἤλεκτρον gave name to (static) electricity because it would move stuff.
HOWever, both ODS for Danish and Hellquist for Swedish take rav/raf (which did exist in Swedish) back to a loan from a Baltic cognate of järpe (a brown bird) so it would be a colour word. raibs in Lithuanian, *rębъ- in PS, *erpaz in PG. But those books are old.
“This kind of find (an object bearing the marks of a geographically distant culture) happens all the dang time. Sometimes we have independent evidence of the people who brought the item, sometimes we don’t. I don’t think there are any actual archaeologists to whom long-distance trade would ‘make no sense.'”
Quite right. And the trade need not have been long-distance. A merchant or trader may have used a coin minted locally to pay another merchant or trader living 100 miles away, who used it to pay a third person living 200 miles away, and so on, until the coin, minted, say, in Baghdad ended up in Scandinavia.
Evidence abounds:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2008/4/7/sweden-finds-viking-era-arab-coins
https://www.academia.edu/30505834/Byzantine_coins_in_Viking_Age_northern_lands
Etc.
Semantically based on the magnetic power of amber
There is a semantic parallel in Iranian, in the family of the Persian word کهربا kahrubā, Middle Persian kah-rubāy, literally ‘straw-seizer, straw-robber’ (cf. Persian که kah ‘straw’; rubāy-, present stem of ربودن rubōdan ‘to seize, rob, carry off’). The long list of descendants in the Wiktionary entry shows that like the material itself, this word has wandered quite far from its sources. If the Iranian etymology of Chinese 琥珀 hǔpò given in the Wiktionary is correct, possibly Mongolian хув ‘amber’ should be added too?
Good heavens, what an interesting family of words: Greek κεχριμπάρι, Macedonian килибар, Romanian chihlimbar, Swahili kaharabu, Tatar гәрәбә (gäräbä)… I had no idea!
Not to mention Arabic كهرباء ‘electricity’!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anbaric
No. [to carbon dating] The amber is like 30 million years old.
Thanks DM. That explains: they’re trying to use (X-ray/ultra-violet) fluorescence to date when the amber was buried. (Because after ~20 years exposure to sunlight, it ceases fluorescing.)
The inscription can’t be dated unless maybe if there’s ink in it, for example.
No ink detected. Some pieces had drill-holes with traces of a gold (thread? necklace?) inside. The X-ray analysis of impurities/alloy seems to be problematic wrt dating and sourcing.
Yes the amber is of Baltic origin. Did it travel no further than Bavaria? Or did it travel to the Peloponnese to get worked, then travel back to Bavaria? _If_ it was still (faintly) fluorescing in 1992 when dug up, it must have had quite an exciting ~20 years.
The Linear B markings (if that’s what they are) seem to be ‘amateurishly’ executed, with several corrections visible. My first hope on reading the intro was Linear B was in active use in Bavaria — presuming no fakery.
I fear the best we can hope is by the time it got to Bavaria it was taken as a trinket with mystic/exotic markings, no understanding of what it ‘said’, so no evidence of writing.
Bavaria was not on the amber road, which went around the Alps in the east. But of course you could get there on the Danube.
That’s what I think.
I remember a heated discussion at a meeting with relatives about that years ago, I was born in Freising which is a stone’s throw from the Bernstorf ruins, and found this here from one of our bigger national papers – the journalist is called Bernstein, which is German for amber, but it’s probably a coincidence (or maybe a sign?).
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/archaeologie-gold-und-bernsteinfunde-von-bernstorf-sind-echt-1.3325849
Nominative determinism.
I did a mental experiment awhile back (specifically with relevance to Norse artifacts from Greenland and Newfoundland after 1000 AD and whether they could reach the Pacific Ocean) as to which kind of object would be most likely to be found far from its origins. I concluded that it would have to be durable, decorative or useful and too good to just throw away, but not valuable enough to automatically gravitate to one of the centers of wealth and power, and something thast might be owner by a common person. I decided it would be a button of bone, stone, horn, or ivory.
This one seems a bit too valuable to fit that model. How often is amber found in that location? Have other Minoan artifacts been found there?
Minoan blue beads are found all over the place and well into Scandinavia.
Ivory found in Kyiv has recently been determined to hail from Greenland. By no stretch of imagination at all it would have travelled much farther.
One of the many valuable things in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is the frequent reminder that people have been traveling vast distances since time immemorial.
Laufer’s century old book on narwhal ivory is what got me started. It seems certain that Greenland ivory reached China sometime not long after the Norse reached Greenland. The route is unproblematic, since the Norse reached Constantinople directly, and Baghdad and Samarqand with an easy intermediary, and from Samarqand (etc.) to China is easy. I also suspect that the Chinese may also have received Alaskan ivory through intermediaries, since the Bering Strait is not impossible to cross for people who are good at that kind of thing, and since the powerful Chinese market sucked in good things from everywhere within reach.
I was wondering if a cultural object might have circumnavigated the globe, and the jump from Labrador, etc., to Alaska was the hard part, an area which I had never studied. The recent book “1000 AD” speculated about the cultural reach of the Norse in Greenland, but (disappointingly to me) only talked about a possible Mayan link. I think that a route via the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes, and the Missouri river is more plausible, but I know little about N America during this time. (I think that the coastal route from Alaska south us well established.). Or even a trans-Arctic link.
And let us curse Brill et al one more time for locking up a public domain article.
https://brill.com/previewpdf/journals/tpao/14/1/article-p315_21.xml
I also speculated long ago that the *word* “kayak” (though not the thing) might have circumnavigated the globe
UPDATE: Though it seems that my speculation of about 15 year ago was refuted something like 10 years ago, unbeknownst to me.
https://languagehat.com/kayakkayik/
the journalist is called Bernstein, which is German for amber,
Nominative determinism.
What’s with the place name ‘Bernstorf’? And why does Google (and other translation engines) think it’s English or at best Dutch — I even got Albanian offered, but not German.
‘torf’ => ‘turf’, i.e. ‘peat'(?)
‘Bern(s)’ we’ve discussed before => ‘brown’, transferred epithet/euphemism to ‘bear’ = the scary brown one, as in Swiss Berne.
I presume ‘Bernstein’ => ‘brown stone’ = ‘amber’.
It seems a little too neat that Bernstein wrote about Bernstein in Bernstorf/they excavated brown stones from brown turf(?)
German WP has an article on the site and an extensive discussion of the controversy, from which I get the impression that the objects are indeed fakes.
@AntC: There are cases where -torf in place names is Dorf “village”. I don’t know how frequent that is in Bavaria; DM probably knows more.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/-trup
Would seem to say that there are various dorf variants in placename endings, torf being one, although no Bavarian examples are given (because there are no names ending in trup there).
Obsidian is an interesting trade item. Now that obsidian can be sourced, it can be seen to travel very long distances (remarkably so in the Pacific). Big obsidian tools break or chip eventually and are repuropsed as smaller tools, and you can see the patter of ever smaller obsidian tools the further they get from their source.
Beads from the Channel Islands in Southern California were found as far away as today’s Eastern Oregon, some 1,000 km away, dated to 6,000–8,500 years b.p.
Also, I read this just a few weeks ago, about Roman glassware found in 5th century Silla tombs in Korea.
Adrienne Mayor, in her book The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times proposes that many mythical beasts of ancient Rome and Greece were based on fossils brought from far away. I seem to recall that she proposes that the gryphon was a Siberian Protoceratops.
In Danish toponyms nobody questions the -rup/-strup/-drup = E thorpe equation. Even if there are a few -torf ones in the mix, those are plausibly from the same stock (or Low German low nobility) and I don’t know how you’d go about proving a specific instance is the turf word instead. ON þorp vs torf so if the attestation is early enough it might be possible, but that’s not the sort of thing you can google up.
Cognate with Welsh tre(f), also common in toponyms.
Morriston, where our main local hospital is, is Treforys in reality, for example.
It seems to have been even commoner in Cornish …
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_in_Cornwall#T
By Tre, Pol and Pen
Shall ye know all Cornishmen.
Several years back my wife and I walked the Pembrokeshire coast trail to Newport, nee Trefdraeth. Hadn’t considered the possibility of a cognate.
No idea about Bavaria specifically, but, first, neutralization of -/st/- and -/sd/- seems to be very common (indeed Augsburg and Innsbruck are locally pronounced with -/ʃp/ rather than -/sb/-); second, a complete merger of /t/ and /d/ covers a wide area of southern Central and northern Upper German.
I would guess Bernstorf is Bernd’s village, where Bernd is the established nickname for Bernhard ~ “tough like a bear”.
“Brown” is most likely not involved in “bear”, though. I can’t link to a specific comment in this long thread because there are several important ones. Best take a day and read the whole thing ^_^
Berne has nothing to do with either. It’s attested as Brenodurum in let’s-call-it-Gaulish.
Oh, I didn’t even know.
Yup.
“All over the place” is hyperbole, or at least an impression in need of citation. I want a website with dynamic maps of finds of traded objects.
Not glass beads, and no spread maps, but on trade in Bronze Age Western Eurasia:
Nicola Ialongo et al: Bronze Age weight systems as a measure of market integration in Western Eurasia, PNAS 118(27)
Helle Vandkilde: Trading and weighing metals in Bronze Age Western Eurasia, PNAS 118(30)
Heide W. Nørgaard et al: Shifting networks and mixing metals: Changing metal trade routes to Scandinavia correlate with Neolithic and Bronze Age transformations, PLoS ONE 16(6)
Terminus post quem Harvaða.
@Trond, it made me think if we can trace spread of [specific details of] shipbuilding and navigation techniques.
If there was a network from the Levant to Norway (and let’s do not forget raids of north african slavers to Ireland and Iceland, even though European captains helped them) there was diffusion. If eventually a drakkar is [based on] a Phoenician invention, that would be funny.
I mean, there is a variety of ways (cf. “a portable vessel of wicker ordinarily used by the Wild Irish”) to build a ship, and numerous technologies of different origin involved in building one…
“For the first time in history, merchants could rely on an objective frame of reference to quantify economic value. ”
Which at the local level, merchants tried to avoid because it reduced their bargaining power. When I was in Taiwan people told me that there were 3 units of weight in use: I forget what the first two were called but I think that one was imperial and one metric, while a traditional Chinese unit was used on the countryside. All called jin.
For another example, in ND ca. 1915, the wheat buyers (from farmers) and the wheat sellers (to millers were the same people, but they used two different units of weight, both called “pound”, and sold more wheat than they bought.
On diffusion, the American mining industry was first manned by Cornishmen, and they retained dominant positions on the labor side into the 20th c. (“Cousin Jack” was their epithet, and they were not beloved by other miners). They brought with them a kind of meat pie called the pasty (pr. passty), which was self-contained and convenient for lunch. Awhile back I googled every mining town I could think of (in PA, MI, MN, MT, CO, ID) and they all had their local pasty.
It’s an appealing idea, but the paleontologist/illustrator Mark Witton is (I think correctly) rather skeptical of the gryphon idea. For one thing, people in Egypt and Mesopotamia were making images and sculptures of gryphons as far back as the 4th millennium BC, and continued doing so for thousand of years, and the morphology is clearly a chimera of “lion or other large cat + raptor”.
people have been traveling vast distances since time immemorial.
65,000-year-old Swiss Army knife design: The prehistoric artefacts, all made to a similar shape and template, are found in enormous numbers across southern Africa across vast distances
Wow, that is very cool.