Reviews
The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris
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There is no West without Homer. So perhaps it is not surprising that the two most important 20th-century contributions to the study of classics—made by the American scholar Milman Parry (1902–1935) and the British architect Michael Ventris (1922–1956)—were also important contributions to our understanding of Homer.
Parry’s intense, romantic life—partly spent studying Slavic oral poetry in the Balkans—came to an end when he shot himself in a hotel room in Los Angeles after being denied tenure at Harvard. His groundbreaking achievement was to demonstrate that the style of Homer’s epics is utterly unlike that of a poet like Virgil (or Milton, or Tennyson, or Yeats), who composed in writing. Parry proved that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed orally—as great stories, or songs, assembled from smaller fragments and only later written down.
Like Parry, Michael Ventris died at a shockingly young age in troubling circumstances. One night, he drove his car full speed into a well-lighted parked truck. This was indeed a loss to scholarship and human knowledge. Ventris, although not a classicist, had accomplished one of the most brilliant decipherments ever, showing the world that an obscure script called Linear B was used to write the Mycenaean Greek language. He thus opened a window of understanding (if a narrow one) onto the lives of the Greeks who lived around the time of the Trojan War (if there was a Trojan War).
Michael Ventris’s story, admirably told in Andrew Robinson’s The Man Who Deciphered Linear B, begins in 1900 when Sir Arthur Evans, inspired by Heinrich Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy and Mycenae, began excavations at the Cretan site of Knossos. Evans soon uncovered traces of an unknown civilization—an early second-millennium B.C. people whom Evans named Minoans, after the legendary King Minos of Crete. The Minoans were literate and sophisticated; they lived in prosperous cities; and they built complex palaces decorated with highly skilled, naturalistic paintings. Evans spent his life and fortune reconstructing the palace at Knossos, where he also found a large cache of clay tablets inscribed with an unknown script—which he called Linear B, to distinguish it from Linear A, a clearly related but earlier Cretan script that has still not been deciphered.
Evans never did publish the hundreds of Linear B tablets, though he unwittingly played a part in their decipherment. Robinson tells the charming story, recalled by Michael Ventris’s tutor, of 14-year-old Michael visiting an exhibition of Greek and Minoan art in London with some of his schoolmates. When the boys met Evans, who happened to be present, young Michael very politely asked: “Did you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, Sir?”
In 1939 University of Cincinnati archaeologist Carl Blegen found a large cache of Linear B tablets on mainland Greece at Pylos. All work 063on the tablets was postponed, however, with the outbreak of World War II. After the war, one of Blegen’s students, Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., who had deciphered the Linear B counting system, published hand-drawn facsimiles of the tablets, along with a “dictionary” of around 89 signs.
Bennett’s transcriptions paved the way for an orderly approach to the decipherment of Linear B, and he and Ventris began to exchange letters. The two men already knew an essential fact about Linear B writing: Its signs represent syllables, not phonemes (or alphabetic signs, the smallest units of sound used in a spoken language). They could assume this because no known system of alphabetic signs numbers more than 36 or so, and such logo-syllabic writings (scripts with some signs standing for words and some signs standing for syllables) as Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform have hundreds of signs, not just 89. Bennett and Ventris could also could separate Linear B writing into words, because groups of signs in the Linear B inscriptions (unlike in most ancient scripts) were divided by a stroke.
Another important discovery was made by the American scholar Alice Kober. Analyzing Bennett’s transcriptions, Kober noticed a certain pattern in some words consisting of five signs. The first three signs (what Kober called “triplets”) would be the same, but the fourth and fifth signs would differ. This suggested that the underlying language made grammatical distinctions by adding endings to a root. (In Latin, for example, amo, amas and amat mean “I love,” “you love” and “he/she loves.”) Kober also suggested that the dissimilar signs might share the same vowel or consonant (for example, the “as” in amas and the “at” in amat have the same vowel), making it theoretically possible to decipher their actual phonetic value.
Kober’s intuition was right—though she never did learn the extent of her contribution. In 1950, only months after Bennett published his transcriptions, she died of cancer.
Bennett and Kober made Michael Ventris’s contribution possible. The difficulty of deciphering Linear B is suggested by the fact that it is the only major language to be deciphered without bilingual texts. Jean-François Champollion was able to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 1820s because of the Rosetta Stone—an early third-century A.D. stela inscribed in hieroglyphics, hieratic (a cursive form of hieroglyphics) and Greek. (Champollion also worked from an Egyptian obelisk with Greek and hieroglyphic inscriptions.) In the 1850s, the British major-general Henry Creswicke Rawlinson used the fifth-century B.C. Behistun inscription—which is carved on a rock face in southern Iran in the Persian, Elamite (not yet deciphered) and Akkadian languages—to decipher the Mesopotamian cuneiform script. Indeed, in both cases the decipherers worked from known names, such as that of the Persian emperor Darius (522–486 B.C.) and the Egyptian Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra (69–30 B.C.), to determine the phonetic principles of the script.
In the case of Linear B, however, there were no already-known names and no bilingual inscriptions. Michael Ventris also had another obstacle in his path: He fervently (and mistakenly) believed that Linear B encoded the Etruscan language.
In 1952 Ventris broke off his work as an architect to work full-time on Linear B. Using a grid system, with vowels written across the top and consonants down the side, he assembled statistical patterns that might reveal the inner workings of the script. He then organized his speculations in work charts and circulated them among scholars.
In The Man Who Deciphered Linear B, Robinson explicitly ties Ventris’s invention of the grid system—as well as his method of sharing his progress with an international group of scholars—to his architectural training. Ventris was interested in solving the puzzle, not fame and glory.
Just how Ventris made the connection between Linear B and an early form of Greek—against everyone’s expectations—we’ll never know, because Ventris himself did not say. In any event, he published his results in 1953 and, as an outsider in the world of academic philology, was immediately attacked for his presumption. But then archaeologist Carl Blegen circulated a fresh find: a picture of a tripod with Linear B signs representing, according to Ventris’s decipherment, the syllables ti-ri-po, the classical Greek word tripos. Soon Ventris gained the invaluable assistance of British scholar John Chadwick, an expert in Greek linguistics, who helped to organize the deciphered material and to prepare the monumental work Documents in Mycenaean Greek, which appeared in 1956 shortly after Ventris’s death. The resistance to Ventris’s decipherment, sometimes virulent, ebbed, and no one today doubts its validity.
This short, highly readable book is a fitting tribute to the quiet outsider who taught the professionals their business and increased our knowledge of the human past. As an achievement of the intellect, the decipherment of Linear B stands beside the discovery of the double helix, although its consequences are more rarefied.
There is no West without Homer. So perhaps it is not surprising that the two most important 20th-century contributions to the study of classics—made by the American scholar Milman Parry (1902–1935) and the British architect Michael Ventris (1922–1956)—were also important contributions to our understanding of Homer.
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