[1] Discovered in the so-called "Archives Complex" of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Messenia in June 1952 by the American archaeologist Carl Blegen, it has been described as "probably the most famous tablet of Linear B".

It was inscribed around 1180 BCE by a senior scribe working for the palatial administration at Pylos, known to scholarship as 'Hand 2' and possibly named Phugebris (Greek: Φυγέβρις).

It has been used as evidence for the workings of the palatial administration, as well as about feasting in the Mycenaean world and the connections between Pylos and Crete in the Late Bronze Age.

PY Ta 641 includes easily-recognised ideograms depicting the vessels it describes, which closely matched the translation of the associated text predicted by Ventris's decipherment.

The designation "PY Ta 641" is made up of three parts: The writers of Linear B tablets are known in scholarship as "hands", after the palaeographic method of identifying them by handwriting.

However, Kyriakidis has described Hand 2 as "one of the most ubiquitous people in the central palatial building", since they seem to have moved around most rooms in the northern part of the palace, including the upper floor.

[24] It forms part of the Ta series, which catalogue similar luxury items – furniture, metal vessels and sacrificial implements – of which Hand 2 made an account when the ruler (wanax) of Pylos appointed a man named Augēwās[d][25] as a provincial governor (damokoros).

[24] The first Linear B tablets from Pylos were discovered on 3 April 1939, during excavations led by the American archaeologist Carl Blegen and the Greek Konstantinos Kourouniotis [el].

[36] This area was filled with loose earth and stones which Blegen considered to be the remains of a wall, dismantled at some point between the medieval and modern period.

"[41] In 1909, Evans published the first volume of Scripta Minoa, which included the then-unpublished Phaistos Disc, which had been discovered in July 1908, and similarly-unpublished tablets excavated by Federico Halbherr from Hagia Triada.

[47] Building on important work by Arthur Cowley and later by Alice Kober, the decipherment of Linear B was completed by Michael Ventris between 1940 and 1952, with a particular "critical period" between 1948 and 18 June 1952.

[50] Ventris's announcement was largely met with scepticism from the scholarly community,[51] including from John Chadwick, who later wrote that he had been "completely taken aback" by the idea that Linear B had been used to write Greek, which he had considered "preposterous".

[55] On 13 July, he wrote to Ventris, offering his help as a "mere philologist" in charting the development of the Greek language between Mycenaean and the better-known Archaic and Classical dialects.

"[60] Beattie argued that "the apparent correspondence between words and ideograms is due to chance", and an artefact of the multiple possibilities offered by Ventris for the pronunciation of each Linear B sign.

"[62] In 1958, Beattie alleged that Ventris had seen a copy or photograph of PY Ta 641 before finalising his decipherment, and then fraudulently presented the tablet as independent evidence of its validity.

Blegen, however, affirmed that the tablet had been locked away until late July, after Ventris had stated his conviction of the Greek solution to Linear B in June, and had remained illegible until the following year.

By 1960, English-speaking scholars generally accepted the decipherment,[63] though the pro-decipherment linguist Leonard Palmer wrote in 1965 of widespread "agnosticism" as to whether the matter could be considered proven.

[64] It remained more controversial among continental European scholars, such as the German philologist Ernst Grumach [de] and the Belgian Byzantinist Henri Grégoire, who disputed it into the 1960s.