The Decipherment of Linear B (Canto)

Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: I enjoyed this book very much. I recommend this book as well as the other book on the decipherment of linear b. It's an amazing story.

Rating:
Summary: A Eureka moment
Review: Michael Ventris was an architect whose knack for languages, both oral training and excellent visual memory, provided the foundation for his avocation, decoding the Cretan script. Archaeology of the pre-hellinic age supplied the material. Among many scholars in Athens in the 1890's to see the Schliemann treasures was Arthur Evans. Based on evidence of the wealth of the civilization, Evans was led to search for prehistoric writing. In excavation at Knossos, Crete he found that the civilization was in his estimation incomparably older than that of Greece.

Early Greek was composed of Greek dialects. Evans found Minoan writing. It is now possible to see that Linear B resulted from adapting the Minoan script to Greek writing. Classical Cypriot writing was seemingly related to Linear B; but the signs can stand for different things and it was too readily assumed that Linear B followed the spelling conventions of Cypriot. Evans concluded that the Minoan language was totally different from that of Mycenaen Greek. The influence of Evans was immense.

Ventris's proof that the people of Knossos spoke Greek was electrifying. Decipherment requires adequate material. From 1950-1952 Ventris was fixated by the idea of Etruscan as the language of Linear B. The code is designed to fool the investigator in cryptography. The script derived from ancient material is only baffling by accident. The Minoan script was a case of an unknown script in an unknown language. In theory any code can be broken. The idea is to grasp the underlying pattern. Classical Greek in general is the dialect of Attica. Ventris pursued the matter by comparing similar signs and coming to the realization variances represented word endings of an inflected language. He saw some Greek solutions for names and eventually came to see a Greek solution was inevitable. Initially he did not understand how archaic the language was that he was dealing with in Linear B.

Crptography is a science of deduction and controlled experiment. After Ventris did a radio broadcast and mentioned his supposition that the language of Linear B was Greek, the author arranged to be put into touch with Ventris. He, a specialist in Greek dialects, became convinced after a few days that the identifictions were sound. Ventris indicated he did need the assistance of a philologist. Chadwick and Ventris formed a partnership that lasted for four years. The first paper was a joint work, Ventris felt it would have more chance of being published that way, and was termed "Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaen Archive." In other words, claims of decoding the text were avoided purposely. Linear B is no Domesday Book. It does not yield riches of detail of Mycenaen life.

Rating:
Summary: A detective story
Review: When he excavated the Minoan city of Knossos in 1900, Arthur Evans found clay tablets containing an unknown language which he named Linear B (he also found variants he named 'hieroglyphic', Linear A, and Linear C). Evans himself began the decipherment process. He discovered that the tablets were palace records and deciphered their numbering system. Since there were about 90 different symbols, he noted, correctly, that the symbols represented syllables rather than alphabetic characters (too many symbols) or ideograms (too few symbols). Beyond these observations, little progress was made until, in 1952, half a century after Linear B was discovered, Michael Ventris announced that he had discovered the means to translate it.
John Chadwick tells the story of Linear B. Not to denigrate the achievement of Champollion's success with Egyption heiroglyphs, Linear B had no Rosetta Stone. It had to be understood soley from the internal evidence of the tablets. The book describes early "solutions" that were guesswork based on untenable analogies or theories. Ventris proceeded differently. The reader becomes amazed at his abilities (he memorized complete texts of symbols before understanding what they meant), his insights, and his thoroughly analytical methodology. The book tells in loving detail the steps leading to the solution. You almost feel you are taking those steps yourself and a sense of excitement grows as you see pieces falling into place. He builds a grid of vowels and consonants and painstakingly fills the symbols into their places. He finds words, and you share in the process of discovering they are an early form of Homeric Greek used in Mycenaen times at the end of the Bronze Age.
Beyond the decipherment, the book tells what we have learned from the tablets about life, economy, trade, agriculture, and armies of Mycenaen Greece.
This book is not only for people interested in the Greek language and history, it is also a fascinating detective story of the solution of an incredibly complex puzzle.