Discovery at Knossos

In the wake of some of the most famous excavations in history, the classicists who put their minds to the tantalising puzzle of deciphering Linear B included the best-known names in the field. After the German scholar Heinrich Schliemann had excavated Troy (or a site compatible with Homer’s famous city) and Mycenae and thereby opened the door to Greek archaeology of the second millennium BC, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans discovered these inscribed tablets in large numbers at Knossos in the year 1900. Evans and other scholars knew that the tablets held the key to a fuller understanding of the Mycenaean civilisation. But deciphering what was inscribed on them seemed an impossible task, given that both the script and the language behind it were unknown.

Unlocking the secrets

After many unsuccessful attempts by would-be decipherers from all over the world, it was a brilliant British amateur called Michael Ventris who was to prove pivotal in the unlocking of the secrets of Linear B.  Ventris was an extraordinary scholar, largely self-taught, with a phenomenal talent for languages. His first encounter with the script occurred when as a schoolboy he was shown some of the clay tablets found at Knossos by Arthur Evans.

This chance meeting prompted a fascination that lasted right up until Ventris’s tragic death in a car crash in 1956. He set himself the task of working out the nature of the writing system and deciphering it. He worked largely alone on making sense of the script but circulated all his thoughts to the greatest scholars in the field in a series of “Work Notes on Minoan Language Research” while pursuing a career as an architect.  Then, on 1 June 1952, he sent around his Work Note 20 entitled, with typical modesty, “Are the Knossos and Pylos tablets written in Greek?”. Building on earlier work, notably by the American scholar Alice Kober, he had – through a combination of sober considerations, the development of a rigorous methodology, the ingenious integration of clues of very different kinds, brilliant assumptions and patient experimentation – single-handedly deciphered the script.

A difficult and archaic Greek

Much against his own original assumptions, Ventris was able to show, ever more clearly over the months that ensued, that the language behind the script was Greek – in his own words “a difficult and archaic Greek, but Greek nevertheless”. Lacking the necessary background in Greek philology and linguistics, in July 1952 he turned to John Chadwick, a newly-appointed lecturer in classics at the University of Cambridge, for professional support. Chadwick was an outstanding classical scholar who had worked on code-cracking in the Second World War. He helped to develop Ventris’s original decipherment and was able to elucidate the historical linguistic background and provided many interpretations of individual tablets.