For almost forty years after Arthur Evans at Knossos, 1900, Linear B looked like a Cretan script. Then, in 1939, the American archaeologist Carl Blegen began digging on a hill near Pylos, in the southwest Peloponnese, where he hoped to find the palace of Nestor, the old king of Pylos in Homer.
Key idea
Why the find mattered
If Linear B had been found only at Knossos, Evans's idea of a purely Minoan script could survive. A large archive at Pylos, in the middle of the Greek mainland, changed the picture. The mainland palaces, centuries later home to Greek speakers, used the same script. That made Greek a reasonable guess for its language, though most scholars still did not take it seriously.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1939 | Blegen finds the archive room at Pylos on the first day of digging |
| 1940s | The war halts work; the tablets are kept safe and photographed |
| 1951 | Emmett Bennett publishes the Pylos tablets, with a standard list of the signs |
| 1952 | Digging resumes; more tablets, including the tripod tablet Ta 641 |
| 1953 | Ta 641 is cleaned, read with Ventris's values, and matches its pictures |
The Pylos tablets also gave scholars something they badly needed: a large set of texts published quickly and carefully. Bennett's edition of 1951 put good copies of the Pylos texts into scholars' hands, which Evans's Knossos tablets had never been. Ventris used it in the months before his breakthrough.
Why it works
Common mistake
Worked example: Which came first?
- Evans dug at Knossos from 1900.
- Blegen found the Pylos archive in 1939.
- Ventris announced his result in 1952.
Answer: Evans (1900), Blegen (1939), Ventris (1952).
Worked example: What changed?
- All known Linear B tablets came from Knossos, on Crete.
- Pylos showed it was also used on the mainland.
Answer: All the tablets came from Knossos, until Pylos.