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Nikos Samartzidis Collection: Linear B Paintings and Poetry

Painting 14 - Seaweed

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2. Painting 02 - Pelion
7. Painting 04 - Grillos «ΤΡΙΖΟΝΙΑ» «...Και τί ομορφιά, τί σύμπνοια! Μέρα νύχτα ν’ ακούς τις νεόνυμφες ελιές και τα προπατορικά τριζόνια...» (Οδυσσέα Ελύτη: «Ο κήπος με τις αυταπάτες») "Grillos“ "...And what a harmony and beauty! Hearing night and day the flowering olive trees and the ancestral crickets chirping…" (Odysseas Elytis: “The Garden with the Illusions”. Free Translation: N. Samartzidis)

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Forgotten Scripts
Why Did Linear B Disappear?
The archaeological traces of Linear B disappear around 1100 B.C. Its syllabary never reappears in the ancient world as a means of writing Greek. By 700 B.C., the people inhabiting the Greek lands and islands were using city- or region-specific variations of the Greek alphabet.

The tablets of Linear B were buried with the palaces they were housed in. The archaeological record shows us that around 1200 B.C. many of the palaces which housed the Linear B tablets were burned and destroyed. Incidentally, the burning of the palaces preserved the clay tablets by firing them.

The bulk of Linear B clay tablets are administrative records. They document inventories of goods at the palatial centers where they were written and stored. Clay tablets on which Linear A and B were written were often reused and sometimes inscriptions appear on both sides of the tablets. Other times, records were even etched onto the tablets' thin edges.

There is much speculation on what caused the collapse of the palace centers where Linear B was in use. No records exist from this period which describe what happened. For more information on this, a book like John Chadwick's The Mycenaean World provides longstanding views.

More granular research on the last days of the Pylos palaces, based on the archaeological record, can be accessed through PASP's Aegean Scholarship portal here.
"Language Homeland"
In his youth on Crete, Samartzidis encountered Greek's earliest syllabic scripts: Linear A, Linear B, and that on the Phaistos Disk. He calls this encounter an “apokalypse.”

In Samartizidis's own words:
•“Crete was really like an ‘apokalypse’ for me. It revealed slowly the dust of my confused world and ‘cosmotheories’ (Samartzidis).”
•“…I found in front of me the syllabic scripts Linear-A and Linear-B as well as the Phaistos Disk. In the beginning I was fascinated with all these signs and symbols, from their pure graphic and artistic values. Then I read the history of the decipherment of Linear-B by Michael Ventris and was doubly fascinated with the plot of the whole story (Samartzidis).”
For Samartzidis, these are a part of his “language homeland.”
•"All these verses I transcribe ... are part of my ‘language homeland,’ this universe in a nutshell that I carry through my birth, my education, my experiences. This universe is not visible but it is comprehensible and perceived through emotions and imagination. The covering of it with Linear-B symbols is like a gold plating technique to beautify and add sparkle to it on the one hand and give it an identifying feature of Hellenism on the other. And - who knows? It might protect it from barbarians too…(Samartzidis).”

One theme that appears throughout the paintings is what a forgotten language would look like in other contexts than clay tablets. One approach Samartzidis takes is to present his paintings as fractured with pieces missing, or nearly washed away like sand on a beach. In another painting, "Seaweed" (below) Samartzidis depicts Linear B characters as if blotted out, its characters and poetry not fully recognizable.