In the 1890s a British archaeologist named Arthur Evans went to Crete looking for something small: seal stones engraved with signs, which some Cretans still wore as charms. Evans suspected the signs were writing, older than anything then known in Europe. He bought land at Knossos, near modern Heraklion, the site of the palace you met in Knossos and the Cretan Palaces.
Key idea
A palace full of tablets
The tablets turned up in room after room. Most were in the script Evans called Linear B ("linear" because the signs are drawn with lines rather than pictures; "B" because it was a later, more regular form than Linear A). Linear A tablets came from other Cretan sites, especially Hagia Triada. In 1909 Evans published the first volume of Scripta Minoa, on the Cretan scripts.
What Evans could and could not see
Evans worked out a good deal. He saw that the tablets were accounts. He recognized the numerals, and he saw that some signs were pictures of what was counted: men, horses, chariots, vessels. He even noticed that some words changed their endings. But he could not read them, and he made two choices that slowed everyone down.
- He kept most of the tablets unpublished. Evans wanted to publish them himself and did not finish. Most Knossos Linear B texts appeared only in 1952, after his death in 1941. Scholars outside his circle had little to work with for decades.
- He was sure the language was Minoan, not Greek. He saw the mainland Mycenaeans as a colonial offshoot of Crete, so Greek seemed impossible to him and to most who followed him.
Why it works
Common mistake
Worked example: Found or believed?
- (a) is a discovery: the tablets were dug up from 1900 on.
- (b) was his interpretation, and Ventris showed in 1952 that Linear B was Greek after all.
Answer: (a) he found; (b) he believed, wrongly for Linear B.
Worked example: How long?
- 1952 − 1900 = 52.
Answer: 52 years.
The story continues on the mainland with Carl Blegen at Pylos. For the full story told as one long read, see How Linear B Was Deciphered.