Soru

The following passage is adapted from an article on early Aegean archaeology and epigraphy:

On April 4, 1939, a joint Hellenic-American archaeological expedition led by Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati initiated test excavations on the hilltop of Epano Englianos near modern Pylos, Greece. Blegen aimed to locate the Mycenaean-era palace mentioned in Homer’s Iliad as the seat of King Nestor. On the very first morning of trenching, workers uncovered a cache of sun-baked clay tablets inscribed with a script known as Linear B. Prior to this discovery, Linear B had been documented exclusively on the island of Crete, most notably by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos during his excavations beginning in 1900. Evans had maintained that Linear B was a non-Greek script unique to Minoan civilization and restricted entirely to Cretan administration. The unexpected presence of inscribed tablets on the Greek mainland immediately challenged Evans's insular narrative.

Among the items cataloged during that initial 1939 season was a distinctive rectangular tablet designated by Blegen's team as Tablet Ta-641. Unlike the vast majority of administrative records found at Epano Englianos—which recorded inventory figures for agricultural goods such as olive oil, grain, and flax—Tablet Ta-641 contained detailed depictions of tripods, three-legged cauldrons, and two-handled drinking vessels. Accompanying these pictogram drawings were ideograms alongside syllabic Linear B characters. The tablet specifically recorded three tripods of Cretan workmanship, two large bronze cauldrons with decorated rims, and four gold-inlaid goblets used for ceremonial libations. Crucially, Blegen carefully photographed and preserved the tablet before burying the excavated trenches to protect the site upon the outbreak of World War II later that autumn.

When archaeological operations resumed in 1952 following the war, British architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris was analyzing high-resolution photographs of Tablet Ta-641 provided by Blegen. Ventris had been working on a grid system developed by American classicist Alice Kober, who had previously identified inflectional patterns in Linear B signs indicating grammatical endings. Using Kober's grid and cross-referencing the ideograms on Tablet Ta-641 with their accompanying syllabic text, Ventris observed that the syllabic word printed alongside the drawing of a three-legged cauldron was ti-ri-po-de, extraordinarily close to the Ancient Greek word tripodes. Furthermore, the text alongside a two-handled vessel read di-pa-we, corresponding to the archaic Greek dipas. On June 18, 1952, Ventris formally announced during a BBC radio broadcast that Linear B was not an undeciphered Minoan tongue, but rather the earliest written form of the Greek language, now known as Mycenaean Greek.

Although Sir Arthur Evans had passed away in 1941 without witnessing the decipherment, his long-standing hypothesis that mainland Greece was merely a provincial dependency of Minoan Crete was decisively disproved by the Pylos tablets. The literal statements recorded on Tablet Ta-641 demonstrated that the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece maintained sophisticated administrative control, native Greek literacy, and complex ritual practices fully independent of Cretan oversight as early as the fourteenth century BCE.

According to the passage, Tablet Ta-641 differed explicitly from the majority of administrative clay tablets discovered at Epano Englianos in 1939 because it cataloged information regarding which of the following?