Michael Ventris - Decipherment

Decipherment

At the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologist Arthur Evans began excavating Knossos, an ancient city on the island of Crete. In doing so he uncovered a great many clay tablets inscribed with an unknown script. Some were older and were named Linear A. The bulk were of more recent vintage, and were dubbed Linear B. Evans spent the next several decades trying to decipher both, to no avail.

In 1936, Evans hosted an exhibition of Cretan archaeology at Burlington House in London, home of the Royal Academy. It was the jubilee anniversary (50 years) of the British School of Archaeology in Athens, contemporaneous owners and managers of the Knossos site. Evans had given the site to them some years previously. Villa Ariadne, Evans home there, was now part of the school. Boys from Stowe school were in attendance at one lecture and tour conducted by Evans himself at age 85, walking with a stick, remembered by Ventris, who was present. The stick was undoubtedly the cane Evans carried all his life to assist him with his short-sightedness and night blindness. He named the stick Prodger. Ventris was 14. Evans held up tablets of the unknown scripts for the audience to see. During the interview period following the lecture Ventris confirmed that Linear B was as yet undeciphered, and determined to decipher it.

Ventris' initial theory was that Etruscan and Linear B were related and that this might provide a key to decipherment. Although this proved incorrect, it was a link he continued to explore until the early 1950s.

Shortly after Evans died, Alice Kober noted that certain words in Linear B inscriptions had changing word endings — perhaps declensions in the manner of Latin or Greek. Using this clue, Ventris constructed a series of grids associating the symbols on the tablets with consonants and vowels. While which were these consonants and vowels remained mysterious, Ventris learned enough about the structure of the underlying language to begin guessing.

Some Linear B tablets had been discovered on the Greek mainland, and there was reason to believe that some of the chains of symbols he had encountered on the Cretan tablets were names. Noting that certain names appeared only in the Cretan texts, Ventris made the inspired guess that those names applied to cities on the island. This proved to be correct. Armed with the symbols he could decipher from this, Ventris soon unlocked much text and determined that the underlying language of Linear B was in fact Greek. This overturned Evans' theories of Minoan history by establishing that Cretan civilization, at least in the later periods associated with the Linear B tablets, had been part of Mycenean Greece.