For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the story of Michael Ventris’s unraveling of the Linear B script from Minoan Crete, so it was a pleasure to be able to tell it for History Today in my brief Months Past feature for July. The discovery was announced in a BBC radio broadcast on 1 July 1953; please do read my account of it here.
Sir Arthur Evans had excavated the palace complex at Knossos at the turn of the century, but in some respects it was his fault that it took so long for Linear B to be deciphered. As Ventris himself said, “disgracefully few of the inscriptions were made generally available for study”. The first volume of Evans’s Scripta Minoa, largely dedicated to hierogplyhs – the earliest known form of writing on the island – was published in 1909. The second didn’t appear for another 43 years, eleven years after his death.
In the interim, numerous attempts were made on Linear B. Among the languages that scholars attempted to discern in it were Finnish, Hebrew, Basque, Hittite, Egyptian, Albanian, Slavonic and Sumerian. Evans himself believed the script and the culture to be anything but Greek: he posited an unknown ‘Eteocretan’ or ‘Anatolian’ language. Most scholars thought it would prove to be Indo-European, and perhaps related to Hittite.
So strongly did a consensus form around this idea that those who dissented suffered for their heresy: the Cambridge archaeologist AJB Wace was refused permission to dig in Greece for years as a result. Ventris himself had been part of that consensus. “The theory that the Minoans could be Greek is based of course upon a complete disregard for historical plausibility,” he had written in his first published essay on the scripts, which appeared in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1940 when Ventris was just eighteen.
Scripta Minoa notwithstanding, the samples of Linear B expanded greatly after World War II with news of substantial new tranches of tablets found at Pylos by Carl Blegen and at Mycenae by the aforementioned Wace. (Once, when Ventris received a book from America in a package labelled ‘Pylos tablets’, a customs official asked him suspiciously what ailment the tablets were meant to cure.)
But Ventris was as surprised as anyone with his eventual discovery, and he wrote sympathetically of one elderly classicist: “It obviously hit a bit hard for an old man to be told that Greek had been sitting under his nose for 40-50 years without his suspecting it.”
As I note for History Today, Ventris was an architect by training, but his obsession with Linear B led to him to dedicate much of his private time to its decipherment. Whether it was because he was outside the academy, or because he was by nature collegiate, he shared his progress - and his thought processes - in correspondence with others around the world working on the same thing.
Alice Kober, without whose insights the breakthrough might not have been made, was probably not alone in being dismissive of his efforts: it was “a step in the wrong direction and… a complete waste of time”, she said. Certainly many didn’t write back to him. Like Ventris, Kober died tragically young. Indeed, she did not live to see his success, dying of cancer in 1950.
After the broadcast, Ventris was joined in his work by the philologist and classicist John Chadwick, who – perhaps appropriately – had spent the war at Bletchley Park translating Japanese ciphers to Berlin. Chadwick characterised himself as Watson to Ventris’s Holmes, and together they worked on a number of papers, as well as a book, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, published in 1956.
Ventris seems to have rather disliked the spotlight, however: “I don’t feel very strong copyright in the suggested solution,” he wrote. “I’d almost rather it was someone else’s.” But his achievement followed him even in death. The inscription on his tomb runs: “Michael Ventris who first read the Minoan Linear B script as Greek”. You wonder, a little sadly, if he would have been disappointed with that.