Michael Ventris was fourteen years old when he heard the aged archaeologist, Arthur Evans, speak to the boys at Stowe School about his excavations at Knossos. Among the exhibits on display that day were clay tablets discovered in the palace of Knossos inscribed with two ancient scripts known as Linear A and Linear B. Despite the best efforts of Evans and other scholars who studied the tablets, the script remained undeciphered and the language unknown.

Ventris determined to crack the code. Ventris was not an outstanding student. But he had a facility for languages. He learned Polish from his mother by the age of six. At the age of 7 he was already studying Egyptian hieroglyphics from a German book. At the age of 18, he published an article theorizing that the language of the Knossos tablets was Etruscan.

Ventris

Various suggestions had been put forth. The language was Basque, Semitic or Pre-hellenic… But by then a consensus had developed in academic circles that the language could not be Greek since the tablets dated to 1400 BC and it was thought that the Greeks did not emerge as a people until the 8th century BC. Homer’s stories about Greek heroes battling it out in the Late Bronze age were thought to be myths and nothing more.

The prevailing orthodoxy said that the Greek language was not written down until the 8th century BC and this using an alphabetic script adopted from the Phoenicians.

It took an outsider who was not a professionally trained linguist to break the paradigm. Although Ventris had gone on to study architecture and settle down to a life as an architect, he continued to work at deciphering Linear B in his spare time.

Linear B was a complicated system comprised of 87 signs. These represented various combinations of consonants and vowels.  When a new set of tablets were found on the Greek mainland, Ventris began to suspect that the language of the tablets was ancient Greek.

In 1952 at age 30 he announced that he had discovered the key to deciphering tablets.  They were Greek.

Syllabic script – 700 years before homer

1400 – 1200 BC

Homer’s heros and gods suddenly became historical

What were greeks doing on Crete?

Like Millman Perry – just a few weeks before publishing book

Scholars attacked him – contradicted most established scholarship

Worked not from professional but with desire to know

Michael Ventris was fourteen years old when he heard the aged archaeologist, Arthur Evans, speak to the boys at Stowe School about his excavations at Knossos. Among the exhibits on display that day were clay tablets discovered in the palace of Knossos inscribed with two ancient scripts known as Linear A and Linear B. Despite the best efforts of Evans and other scholars who studied the tablets, the script remained undeciphered and the language unknown.

Ventris determined to crack the code. Ventris was not an outstanding student. But he had a facility for languages. He learned Polish from his mother by the age of six. At the age of 7 he was already studying Egyptian hieroglyphics from a German book. At the age of 18, he published an article theorizing that the language of the Knossos tablets was Etruscan.

Ventris

Various suggestions had been put forth. The language was Basque, Semitic or Pre-hellenic… But by then a consensus had developed in academic circles that the language could not be Greek since the tablets dated to 1400 BC and it was thought that the Greeks did not emerge as a people until the 8th century BC. Homer’s stories about Greek heroes battling it out in the Late Bronze age were thought to be myths and nothing more.

The prevailing orthodoxy said that the Greek language was not written down until the 8th century BC and this using an alphabetic script adopted from the Phoenicians.

It took an outsider who was not a professionally trained linguist to break the paradigm. Although Ventris had gone on to study architecture and settle down to a life as an architect, he continued to work at deciphering Linear B in his spare time.

Linear B was a complicated system comprised of 87 signs. These represented various combinations of consonants and vowels.  When a new set of tablets were found on the Greek mainland, Ventris began to suspect that the language of the tablets was ancient Greek.

In 1952 at age 30 he announced that he had discovered the key to deciphering tablets.  They were Greek.

Syllabic script – 700 years before homer

1400 – 1200 BC

Homer’s heros and gods suddenly became historical

What were greeks doing on Crete?

Like Millman Perry – just a few weeks before publishing book

Scholars attacked him – contradicted most established scholarship

Worked not from professional but with desire to know