Michael Ventris and Linear B

Michael Ventris was a linguistic genius. At a young age he could speak English, French, German and Polish. But no one guessed what he was destined to achieve.

One day, some time in the 1930s when he was a boy, Michael's school class went to see an exhibit of Minoan artefacts. Minoan civilization on Crete had been uncovered by Sir Arthur Evans. By sheer coincidence. Sir Arthur himself happened to be at the exhibit that day. He came across the school excursion and took the group behind the scenes to show them the writing of Minoan times. There were two scripts, called Linear A and Linear B. Linear B was obviously evolved from Linear A, and seemed to denote a different language, but no one knew how to read either.

In what proved to be the leading question of the century, as Sir Arthur showed the boys the enigmatic scripts, young Michael said to Sir Arthur, "Did you say the tablets have not as yet been deciphered sir?"

Sir Arthur tried hard but he never did decode the scripts. Nor did he ever learn their secret, because he died before the young boy he'd met by chance went on to break Linear B. Sir Arthur was however still alive when stacks of Linear B tablets were discovered at Pylos on the mainland of Greece, which surprised him. Mycenaean civilization was taking off at this time, and Crete had begun its slow decline. So what was a Cretan language doing outside Crete?

Michael Ventris was obsessed by Linear B from that day on. By the age of 18, he'd written a paper in which he attempted to prove Linear B was related to Etruscan, another ancient language which no one could read. Ventris become an architect by trade, but his real vocation was the attack on Linear B.

Here's a hint if you're ever called on to decode an utterly unknown ancient script: count the symbols. If there are hundreds, you're looking at a hieroglyphic script. If there are more than 40 to 70, you're probably looking at a syllabic script, where each symbol denotes a single sound, usually as consonant-vowel pairs. If there are 30 or less symbols you're looking at an alphabet, like in English. Combinations are common too. Our letters are an alphabet, but our digits 0 to 9 are hieroglyphs.

Linear B had enough symbols that it was almost certainly a syllabic script. So Ventris, by this time a young man, created sheet after sheet of tables like this, which I've taken from the BBC:

Since every symbol was a consonant-vowel pair, down the left are consonants, and across the top are vowels. Which is really quite clever because every symbol should have its own cell, but symbols will share common consonants and vowels. Now all Ventris had to do was work out what were the consonants, what were the vowels and which symbol went where, all based on a script for which no one had any idea what anything said. What could be simpler?

Ventris spent years fiddling with this.

Another scholar named Alice Kober was also attacking Linear B. Ventris and Kober did try to work together for a short while, but apparently she was rather hard to get on with and they went their separate ways. Kober made two important discoveries: she proved that the endings of some Linear B words changed in a regular pattern, which suggested the language was inflected, and more importantly, she noticed that there were some words which appeared on tablets found in Crete but never on tablets from the mainland.

That last observation proved the trick. As soon as he heard it, Ventris made the inspired guess that the words which only appeared in Cretan tablets were place names. He threw those words at his clever sound charts, then shifted consonants and vowels back and forth until he had a few place names he could recognize. Ventris had been sure Linear B would turn out to be Etruscan. What fell out, to his utter shock, was extremely early, ultra-archaic Greek.

Now that he had some sound values that he knew for sure were right, and a pretty good idea that he was looking at Greek, Ventris was able to decipher sufficient other words that he could make sense of some Linear B texts.

On 1st July, 1952, Ventris announced on the BBC that he could read Linear B. A classics professor at Cambridge called Chadwick happened to be listening. He instantly called Ventris and offered to help with the remaining work. Chadwick was the perfect ally. Not only was he a classics expert, but he'd spent WW2 working as a code breaker for the Royal Navy. Ventris and Chadwick published Documents in Mycenaean Greek. Not the catchiest title ever, but an incredible book (and highly readable btw). Michael Ventris had done something which no one before in history had ever done: he'd decoded an ancient script without any idea what any of it said.

In a single stroke, Greek had become the world's second oldest living language, after Chinese. The discovery also totally rewrote the prehistory of Europe. Up until that time, it was thought that the first Greeks were the people who invaded centuries later, and brought down Mycenae. Linear B proved the Greeks had arrived in waves, and the first wave had brought down Minoan civilization and founded Mycenae. In the process Greek had subsumed the original Cretan language of Linear A, and the Linear A symbols had been (poorly) adapted to cope with the new tongue.

Weirdly, the later Greeks had no idea their language had once been written down. When what we know of as the Greek alphabet came by about 600 years later, they thought it was the first time.

To this day no one knows how to read Linear A. Ventris died in a car accident three years after his great achievement. He was only 33. If he'd lived, he might have gone on to break Linear A, or Etruscan, but now we'll never know. But at least we have Linear B to read, and if Sir Arthur Evans hadn't run into the school group and Ventris at the exhibition, it might never have happened.