This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Decipherment revealed that Linear B was never used for literature, correspondence or history in the way later Greek writing would be. Nearly everything that survives is administrative: inventories of grain, wine, oil and figs, records of livestock, lists of textile workers and their rations, and accounts of bronze and other raw materials moving through a palace economy. The tablets themselves survive almost by accident. They were unbaked clay, never intended to last, and would ordinarily have dissolved or been recycled; the ones that reached archaeologists today were preserved because the palaces that held them, at sites including Knossos and Pylos, burned down, and the fire that destroyed the buildings accidentally baked the clay tablets hard enough to survive for more than three thousand years. That narrow subject matter shapes what the tablets can and cannot tell historians: Linear B is an extraordinarily detailed window onto Mycenaean palace bookkeeping, naming officials, goods, and place names in unusual density, but it says almost nothing directly about Mycenaean religion, warfare, or daily life outside the palace's own accounting needs, leaving plenty for archaeology and later Greek tradition to fill in.