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Dr.
Richard Baldwin, Gulf Coast Community College.
This page last updated
08/13/08
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In 1936, a 14-year-old boy named Michael Ventris went to an exhibit of Minoan artifacts that the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans had displayed in London. Ventris shyly approached the 85-year-old Evans and asked, "Did you say [these tablets] haven't been deciphered, Sir?" "I did," Evans answered. The brief encounter proved to be a symbolic passing of the torch, as Ventris, like Evans, would spend years trying to decipher Linear B. In 1901, Evans, conducting an excavation at the site of the 3,500-year-old palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete, unearthed more than 3,000 clay tablets bearing an unknown form of writing. Referred to by scholars as Linear B, these hieroglyphics baffled archaeologists and linguists for over 50 years. Archaeologists believed that a deciphered Linear B might help fix the date of the arrival of the Greeks in the Aegean. Evans believed that Cretan (called Minoan after Crete's legendary King Minos) civilization had been overrun and destroyed by foreign invaders, most likely the Greeks, and that the language represented by the script on the tablets belonged to the perished civilization of the Minoans. It was not, he firmly believed, a representation of Greek. Evans died in 1941, never having deciphered the mystery of Linear B. In 1952, Michael Ventris, now an architect and cryptographer, analyzed various arrangements of Linear B's 90 symbols. Soon after these analyses, however, he announced a startling conclusion: The language represented by Linear B was in fact the oldest known Greek dialect. Ventris's investigation had revealed that the texts on the tablets were actually crude representations of open syllables from archaic Greek words, most without a beginning or ending consonant, so that, for example, the Greek word for seed, sperma, would appear in Linear B as "pe-ma." Although the decipherment of Linear B helped confirm a Greek presence in the Aegean at least by 1400 BC--far earlier than previously believed--it did not ultimately resolve the many historical and archaeological questions surrounding this period. |
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