Decoding the Linear B | History Today

‘Did you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, sir?’ The question came from a 14-year-old boy on a school tour of the Minoan Room at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1936. The man being addressed was Sir Arthur Evans, then 85. The boy was Michael Ventris.

Evans had excavated the palace complex of Knossos and uncovered the material remains of Minoan Crete at the turn of the century. He was looking for evidence of writing; he found it just a week into his dig. The most abundant was in a script that Evans called Linear B, which emerged around 1400 BC. The language, he thought, would be anything but Greek.

Ventris trained as an architect, but he remained obsessed with Linear B. ‘It is’, he wrote, ‘rather like doing a crossword puzzle on which the positions of the black squares have not been printed for you.’

The path to decipherment was paved with the work of others, notably Alice Kober, who noticed patterns in Linear B suggestive of inflection. Ventris’ great intuitive leap was to apply this idea to place-names. Suddenly, out of the opaque and unreadable past, emerged recognisable forms of ‘Knossos’ and its harbour, ‘Amnisos’. The language was Greek.

Just weeks after the breakthrough, on 1 July 1953, Ventris was invited to talk about Linear B on the BBC. The Times dubbed it ‘the Everest of Greek Archaeology’. The broadcast was the first most scholars in the field knew of it; the proof, as one wrote, ‘came as an electrifying shock to almost all those who studied the question’.

As with most other early writing systems, Linear B revealed a kind of audit trail of livestock, crops and goods, of trades, people and places. Hopes of finding pre-Homeric poetry have been disappointed.

Michael Ventris was killed in a car crash, aged 34, in 1956. The following year a tablet was found at Pylos with a routine list on one side and, on the reverse, a labyrinth. It recalls the legendary labyrinth of King Minos at Knossos. But it also seems a good metaphor for decipherment and its revelations: a slow and daring journey into the unknown.