Alice Kober's pairs (Alice Kober's Triplets) said which signs shared a consonant or a vowel. Michael Ventris, a young British architect who had been fascinated by the tablets since he heard Arthur Evans lecture in 1936, at the age of 14, took the next step. He put the relations into one big table: the grid.
🔑 Key idea
Ventris arranged signs in a grid so that all signs in one row shared a consonant and all signs in one column shared a vowel, before he knew what any of those consonants and vowels were. Sounds came last: once a few cells were known, the grid passed them along whole rows and columns.
Build a grid the way Kober and Ventris did. Place each sign by the clues so that rows share a consonant and columns share a vowel; then add the sounds.
An empty grid
Ventris worked through 1951 and 1952, sending his results to other scholars in a series of work notes. His grids had numbered rows and columns but no sounds. He filled them with evidence like Kober's: endings that changed, spelling variants of one word, signs that appeared at the start of words (probably plain vowels, since a syllabary needs vowel signs to begin words like a-mi-ni-so). Every placement was a claim he could test against the next tablet.
A grid before the sounds: signs placed by their relations only. The labels were added later.
vowel 1
vowel 2
vowel 3
consonant 1
𐀒
?
𐀑
consonant 2
𐀰
𐀮
𐀯
consonant 3
𐀜
?
𐀛
💡 Why it works
Why is a grid so powerful? It multiplies every discovery. If you learn that one sign in a row begins with s, every sign in that row begins with s. If you learn that one sign in a column ends in o, every sign in that column ends in o. So one secure value can fix five signs, and two crossing values can fix a whole corner. That is how a handful of good guesses could unlock the script.
⚠️ Common mistake
Assuming the grid was filled with sounds from the start. It began as relationships only: "these signs share something". Ventris changed his grid many times as evidence came in. Check: in a grid built this way, a cell can be correctly placed long before anyone knows its value.
The full Linear B grid today has 13 rows (the vowels alone and 12 consonants) and 5 columns. Explore it in the sign grid.
✏️ Worked example: Use the grid
Sign X is in the same row as ko and the same column as ti. What is its value?
Same row as ko: X begins with k.
Same column as ti: X ends in i.
Put them together: k + i.
Answer:ki
✏️ Worked example: Pass a value along
A row holds four signs whose values are unknown. You learn that one of them is na. What do you now know about the other three?
Signs in one row share a consonant.
na begins with n.
Answer: They all begin with n (ne, ni, no or nu).
Practice
Pass with 3 right answers, the last 2 in a row. Each right answer earns 3 XP.