Linear A and BThe Decipherment

Greek, 1952

Ventris announced on BBC radio on 1 July 1952 that Linear B was Greek; with John Chadwick he published the case in 1953.

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In The Breakthrough: Cretan Place Names you saw the breakthrough. Now the story moves fast. On 1 July 1952 Michael Ventris, then 29 years old, gave a talk on BBC radio. He told listeners that the tablets of Knossos and Pylos were written in Greek, "a difficult and archaic Greek", as he put it, but Greek.

Key idea

Ventris announced on BBC radio on 1 July 1952 that Linear B was Greek. John Chadwick, a Cambridge scholar of early Greek, heard the talk and joined him; in 1953 they published the case in the Journal of Hellenic Studies.
The discovery and decipherment, AD 1900 to 1956. Tap an event to read more.

A surprise to Ventris himself

Ventris had not set out to prove Linear B was Greek. In 1940, still a teenager, he published an article arguing that the language was related to Etruscan, and he kept looking in that direction into the early 1950s. When Greek words began to appear, he treated the idea with suspicion at first, half expecting it to collapse. It did not.

Chadwick joins

John Chadwick, a lecturer at Cambridge who had worked on codebreaking during the war, heard the broadcast and wrote to Ventris. Chadwick knew early Greek dialects deeply; Ventris knew the script. Together they wrote "Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives", published in 1953. In 1956 came their book Documents in Mycenaean Greek. That September, weeks before the book appeared, Ventris was killed in a road accident, aged 34.

The road to the decipherment.
DateEvent
1936Ventris, 14, hears Arthur Evans lecture on the Cretan scripts
1945 to 1948Alice Kober's papers on inflection and the related signs
1951Bennett publishes the Pylos tablets with a standard sign list
1 July 1952Ventris announces on BBC radio that Linear B is Greek
1953Ventris and Chadwick's article; the tripod tablet confirms the readings
1956Documents in Mycenaean Greek; Ventris dies in September

Why it works

Why did Ventris's surprise make his case stronger? A person who wants a certain answer can find it almost anywhere, by bending the evidence. Ventris wanted Etruscan, so Greek was the answer the evidence forced on him, not one he forced on the evidence. Good decipherments often look like this: the data push the decipherer somewhere unexpected.

Common mistake

Imagining Ventris set out to prove Linear B was Greek. He expected something like Etruscan, and the Greek results surprised him. Check: his 1940 article argued for a link with Etruscan; Greek came from the grid, not from his hopes.

Worked example: Put in order

Order these: the 1953 article; the BBC talk; Bennett's Pylos tablets.
  1. Bennett published the Pylos tablets in 1951.
  2. Ventris spoke on the BBC in July 1952.
  3. The article with Chadwick appeared in 1953.

Answer: Bennett (1951), the BBC talk (1952), the article (1953).

Worked example: Who did what?

Ventris supplied the grid and the values. What did Chadwick bring?
  1. Chadwick was a specialist in early Greek and its dialects.
  2. He could judge whether the readings were real Mycenaean Greek forms.

Answer: Expert knowledge of early Greek.

Practice

Pass with 3 right answers, the last 2 in a row. Each right answer earns 2 XP.

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Sources and further reading

@teddyrookbook GitHub