Michael Ventris and his deciphering of Linear B

Following the circulation of his “Mid-Century Report” on Linear B in 1950, Michael Ventris ‘gave up his architectural job to work full-time on Linear B’ (http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/research_groups_and_societies/mycenaean_epigraphy/decipherment/life_of_ventris/). In his attempt for deciphering, Ventris ‘wondered about the repeated groups of symbols identified by (Alice) Kober as evidence of inflection’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620). Then he began to work – in his words, ‘rather like doing a crossword puzzle on which the positions of the black squares haven’t been printed for you’ (http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/research_groups_and_societies/mycenaean_epigraphy/decipherment/life_of_ventris/) – assuming the characters as a syllabic system and focused on finding some place names because these are ‘exactly the kinds of thing you’d expect to crop up all the time, especially on official palace documents. And place names often don’t change much, even after centuries’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620). By February 1952, ‘he wrote to (John) Myres about the Knossos place names’ (http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/research_groups_and_societies/mycenaean_epigraphy/decipherment/life_of_ventris/) he had deciphered in the script and by May, ‘he felt the code was “breaking” and that, to his astonishment, the Linear B documents were, after all, written in Greek’ (ibid). Then, Ventris was invited to talk about Myre’s publication on the BBC Third Programme and he ‘took the opportunity to announce the decipherment and it was broadcast to the world on 1 July 1952’ (ibid). The broadcast enabled Ventris to collaborate with John Chadwick, a professional philologist – especially an expert on early Greek – who heard the programme, and they worked together closely for deciphering the script for a next few years.

Michael Ventris

As a result, it turned out that Linear B was ‘a form of ancient Greek, which had been taken to Crete by invaders from the mainland. The Greeks themselves did not develop an alphabet until centuries later, but at Knossos their language was written down for the first time, using an ancient script indigenous to the island’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620). It would be worth to mention that ‘In a lecture after he had cracked Linear B…Ventris did however give substantial credit to Kober for her contribution – but this acknowledgement went largely unnoticed’ (ibid). Some argue that ‘Ventris would never have been able to crack the code, had it not been for an American classicist, Alice Kober’ (ibid) whilst others ‘question whether Kober would have had the creative spark to jump the final hurdle’ (ibid). Long before answering to this question, Michael Ventris ‘died in a tragic car accident on 6 September 1956’ (http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/research_groups_and_societies/mycenaean_epigraphy/decipherment/life_of_ventris/), while he was ‘At the height of his fame and just weeks before the publication of his great joint work with Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek’ (ibid). The accident ‘has never been fully explained (and) some believe it may have been suicide’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620).

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/discovery-and-deciphiering-of-the-crete-inscriptions-liner-b/