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The Decipherment of Linear B
The languages of the ancient world and the mysterious scripts, long undeciphered, in which they were encoded have represented one of the most intriguing problems of archaeology in modern times. This celebrated account of the decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris was written by his close collaborator in the momentuous discovery. In revealing the secrets of Linear B it offers a valuable survey of late pre-Hellenic archaeology, uncovering fascinating details of the religious and economic history of an ancient civilization.
164 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1958
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About the author
John Chadwick
73 books12 followersJohn Chadwick, FBA was an English linguist and classical scholar who was most notable for the decipherment, with Michael Ventris, of Linear B.
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March 12, 2022
We Are What We Write
The world changed decisively in or around 776 BCE. Arguably the most important cultural event of European history took place then somewhere in the Greek peninsula. No, it wasn’t the mere matter of the first Olympic Games - although that may be connected. It was the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet, from which all other alphabets are derived. It is arguably this act that promoted the creation of European literature. It shifted an entire culture from one grounded on anonymous bardic legends to one of cosmic story-telling, led of course by the great Homer.
Writing itself in one of its various forms - pictographic, syllabic and alphabetic - had existed for several millennia before that point, but not really a literature. The 8th century breakthrough was the transformation of the Greek written language from one used for public administration, accounting, military reporting, and royal histories to one of everyday affairs. Language had suddenly become literature. And the first things written about in the new script were the legends that had been passed down verbally in the form of song.
Linear B is one of the predecessor written languages to Homeric Greek. It was used in the Mycenaean civilisation in the late Bronze Age, perhaps as early as 1600 BCE. The Mycenaeans were in turn the successors to the Minoan culture, the first identifiable European civilisation, and adapted the Minoan writing system for use in primitive Greek. However until the mid-20th century, the fact that Linear B was a representation of Greek wasn’t even guessed at. Chadwick’s book is an homage to the young philologist who had the insight and professional skill to connect the linguistic dots which proved that Linear B was a form of Greek.
What is arguably more interesting in this academic saga, at least to me, is the cultural watershed created by the transition of Greek civilisation out of Linear B and similar scripts into an alphabetised system. Chadwick hints at the impact of the change when he says that this “writing changed much of the Greek way of life. not least its poetry.” My hypothesis, which I am entirely unable to support other than by deductive evidence, is that the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet had a dramatic effect on the way in which written language was used and the proliferation of its use within the population. I suggest that the later adoption of the Greek alphabet as a phonetic translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the Coptic language had similar effects.
Linear B had elements of all three forms of writing - ideograms like Chinese and ancient Egyptian, syllabic signs as in modern Japanese, and alphabetic components as in all European languages. Pictograms have the singular advantage of being entirely independent of pronunciation, and thus can accommodate diverse dialects while remaining intelligible among them. The disadvantage is that pictograms either limit vocabulary or require considerable skills of memory to use even in simple expression. Chinese children must learn something like 5000 pictograms to be fluent, for example.
Syllabic scripts have the opposite problem. They are tied tightly to pronunciation and therefore are difficult to use across spoken dialects. In addition, syllabic scripts become very complex if they are required to express the range of sounds possible in a language. English, for example has over 10,000 syllabic possibilities.
As with Chinese, it is clearly possible to cope with these inherent limitations of syllabic script in the creation of a literature. Nevertheless, I suggest that the use of a phonetic alphabet provides a compromise between pictographic and syllabic writing. An alphabet is relatively simple to learn, can accommodate a range of dialects, and need not define each phoneme uniquely.
The ‘simplification’ of Greek script from a ‘composite’ like Linear B, therefore, could have had significant benefit. Alphabetic script can mimic new vocabulary as it emerges, for example, and therefore include more and more non-official events. Eventually alphabetic writing can ‘capture’ bardic legends which had been purely verbal. Homer is the prime instance of this effect.
If I am in any way correct is this analysis, the process by which European literature was created is very different from that of non-alphabetic cultures. In a sense the development of an alphabetic literature is likely to be a more popular than a palace affair since it involves the written formulation of popular legend rather than the extension of official reporting.
But there is also another, less advantageous, consequence of alphabetic literature. Official non-alphabetic records are directed toward ensuring truth, either by preventing errors in memory or by creating fixed records, usually of amounts. In short, this form of writing is meant to combat lies.
On the other hand, alphabetic writing is primarily concerned with story-telling, not with the recording of amounts or events but with the documentation of tales. While there is little chance of an ancient palace administrator confusing his records of the grain in the royal warehouse with the actual grain, there is every possibility that those reading the Homeric narratives consider them to be about actual events.
The telling of tales is not lying. But as the world has experienced repeatedly, some tales expressed in popular alphabetic script tend to be given a privileged status. Like the Judaea-Christian scriptures, they are considered more real than existential reality. These written records don’t inhibit lies; rather they are claimed as establishing truth.
My thought, therefore, is that the very process by which Greek (and therefore European) writing developed has to a significant extent created what might be called the ‘epistemological problem.’ This includes the rather persistent European involvement in dogmatic religion and its anti-social consequences. Essentially, we Europeans tend to confuse our words with things. In perfecting the Semitic invention of alphabetic writing, the ancient Greeks started us on a road of self-deception as well as self-discovery.
Proving perhaps once again that there is no free lunch, especially when it comes to culture.
Postscript 15Dec21: It turns out that there is indeed a theory of the sort I conjectured. The Italian philosopher Carlo Sini believes that Western civilisation’s development of alphabetic writing, “does more than simply preserve knowledge; rather, it is at the origin of psychological idealism and the krisis of European sciences Husserl laments” Sini argues how it is only with the practice of alphabetic writing and reading (invented by the Greeks, inherited by the Romans, and still in use today) that the analytical-rational, that is, scientifi cphilosophical mentality characterizing Western culture could develop. See also: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
The world changed decisively in or around 776 BCE. Arguably the most important cultural event of European history took place then somewhere in the Greek peninsula. No, it wasn’t the mere matter of the first Olympic Games - although that may be connected. It was the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet, from which all other alphabets are derived. It is arguably this act that promoted the creation of European literature. It shifted an entire culture from one grounded on anonymous bardic legends to one of cosmic story-telling, led of course by the great Homer.
Writing itself in one of its various forms - pictographic, syllabic and alphabetic - had existed for several millennia before that point, but not really a literature. The 8th century breakthrough was the transformation of the Greek written language from one used for public administration, accounting, military reporting, and royal histories to one of everyday affairs. Language had suddenly become literature. And the first things written about in the new script were the legends that had been passed down verbally in the form of song.
Linear B is one of the predecessor written languages to Homeric Greek. It was used in the Mycenaean civilisation in the late Bronze Age, perhaps as early as 1600 BCE. The Mycenaeans were in turn the successors to the Minoan culture, the first identifiable European civilisation, and adapted the Minoan writing system for use in primitive Greek. However until the mid-20th century, the fact that Linear B was a representation of Greek wasn’t even guessed at. Chadwick’s book is an homage to the young philologist who had the insight and professional skill to connect the linguistic dots which proved that Linear B was a form of Greek.
What is arguably more interesting in this academic saga, at least to me, is the cultural watershed created by the transition of Greek civilisation out of Linear B and similar scripts into an alphabetised system. Chadwick hints at the impact of the change when he says that this “writing changed much of the Greek way of life. not least its poetry.” My hypothesis, which I am entirely unable to support other than by deductive evidence, is that the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet had a dramatic effect on the way in which written language was used and the proliferation of its use within the population. I suggest that the later adoption of the Greek alphabet as a phonetic translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the Coptic language had similar effects.
Linear B had elements of all three forms of writing - ideograms like Chinese and ancient Egyptian, syllabic signs as in modern Japanese, and alphabetic components as in all European languages. Pictograms have the singular advantage of being entirely independent of pronunciation, and thus can accommodate diverse dialects while remaining intelligible among them. The disadvantage is that pictograms either limit vocabulary or require considerable skills of memory to use even in simple expression. Chinese children must learn something like 5000 pictograms to be fluent, for example.
Syllabic scripts have the opposite problem. They are tied tightly to pronunciation and therefore are difficult to use across spoken dialects. In addition, syllabic scripts become very complex if they are required to express the range of sounds possible in a language. English, for example has over 10,000 syllabic possibilities.
As with Chinese, it is clearly possible to cope with these inherent limitations of syllabic script in the creation of a literature. Nevertheless, I suggest that the use of a phonetic alphabet provides a compromise between pictographic and syllabic writing. An alphabet is relatively simple to learn, can accommodate a range of dialects, and need not define each phoneme uniquely.
The ‘simplification’ of Greek script from a ‘composite’ like Linear B, therefore, could have had significant benefit. Alphabetic script can mimic new vocabulary as it emerges, for example, and therefore include more and more non-official events. Eventually alphabetic writing can ‘capture’ bardic legends which had been purely verbal. Homer is the prime instance of this effect.
If I am in any way correct is this analysis, the process by which European literature was created is very different from that of non-alphabetic cultures. In a sense the development of an alphabetic literature is likely to be a more popular than a palace affair since it involves the written formulation of popular legend rather than the extension of official reporting.
But there is also another, less advantageous, consequence of alphabetic literature. Official non-alphabetic records are directed toward ensuring truth, either by preventing errors in memory or by creating fixed records, usually of amounts. In short, this form of writing is meant to combat lies.
On the other hand, alphabetic writing is primarily concerned with story-telling, not with the recording of amounts or events but with the documentation of tales. While there is little chance of an ancient palace administrator confusing his records of the grain in the royal warehouse with the actual grain, there is every possibility that those reading the Homeric narratives consider them to be about actual events.
The telling of tales is not lying. But as the world has experienced repeatedly, some tales expressed in popular alphabetic script tend to be given a privileged status. Like the Judaea-Christian scriptures, they are considered more real than existential reality. These written records don’t inhibit lies; rather they are claimed as establishing truth.
My thought, therefore, is that the very process by which Greek (and therefore European) writing developed has to a significant extent created what might be called the ‘epistemological problem.’ This includes the rather persistent European involvement in dogmatic religion and its anti-social consequences. Essentially, we Europeans tend to confuse our words with things. In perfecting the Semitic invention of alphabetic writing, the ancient Greeks started us on a road of self-deception as well as self-discovery.
Proving perhaps once again that there is no free lunch, especially when it comes to culture.
Postscript 15Dec21: It turns out that there is indeed a theory of the sort I conjectured. The Italian philosopher Carlo Sini believes that Western civilisation’s development of alphabetic writing, “does more than simply preserve knowledge; rather, it is at the origin of psychological idealism and the krisis of European sciences Husserl laments” Sini argues how it is only with the practice of alphabetic writing and reading (invented by the Greeks, inherited by the Romans, and still in use today) that the analytical-rational, that is, scientifi cphilosophical mentality characterizing Western culture could develop. See also: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Read
October 17, 2018To say that a book is the exciting story of the decipherment of prehistoric bookkeeping records seems like damning with faint phrase, but that is what it is.
During the excavation of the Bronze Age Palace at Knossos at the beginning of the twentieth century Arthur Evans found hundreds of inscribed clay tablets, written in two different (but similar) scripts which he called Linear A and Linear B. Evans was prone to odd ideas (controversially he rebuilt and repainted parts of the excavated palace) and in a dog in the forest way he declared that the inhabitants of ancient Crete were not Greek and that the language used to write the tablets was not Greek.
Thus began a fifty year period of speculation and attempts at decoding the tablets. Unsurprisingly given Evans' authoritative statement that the tablets were not written in Greek, they were linked to any and all languages known to have been in use around the eastern Mediterranean.
Speculation and grand ideas are all well and good, but the strength of this book lies in the explanation of the work involved in the analysis of the tablets. What signs were used. How frequently each was used. What were the patterns of usage.
The focus of the book is on the work that Micheal Ventris did in his free time - his day job was designing schools as an architect for the UK ministry of Education in the brave new world of the 1950s. But even before he took up Linear B as a hobby in 1950, other scholars had been working on the system of weights and measures used, gender and some patterns of usage in the linear B tablets. So from basic analysis it was possible to conclude that the tablets were written in a syllabary, not an alphabet, or in pictographs, and which signs where likely to be vowels and which represented numbers and so on.
All of this was done without computers. Everything had to be done by hand. Recognising signs used by eye and remembering where one had seen something before.
In one way it was a help that researchers only had access to a few hundred tablets (although as it turned out not all the printed reproductions were entirely accurate), although at the same time the larger the body of texts the greater the chance of successful decipherment. Linear A is still undeciphered for that reason, too few texts at all, or too many short texts.
The book then follows through the efforts of Ventris, and eventually the author of this book, to crack the code, decipher the script and establish the language that it was written in. Much to Ventris' surprise Greek seemed to best fit. The initial problem was that the language used in the tablets was Mycenaean Greek. A form of the Greek language unknown apart from the evidence of the tablets themselves. This was language a thousand years (give or take a couple of years) older than the next most recent written form of the language. The odd co-incidence of written forms with obscure usage from the Iliad pleases Chadwick and in the way that evidence does, disproved some theories on what early forms of Greek might have been like.
Finally we are left with the picture of the Mycenaean world that emerges from the Linear B texts. And the written world of the heroes of Homer is the world of bean counters. The documents are largely stores records. How many chariot wheels are in stock or the size of flocks. Accountancy and bookkeeping - such are the origins of European culture!
Ventris died in a car crash in 1956 and so alongside the story of the decryption and the excitement of discovering the world described on the tablets there is the acknowledgement of the loss of a scholar. Tributes to his modesty, aptitude for languages and even to his penmanship "he was a first-rate draughtsman, and his handwriting had the regularity and clarity of printing, without, however, being devoid of character" are scattered here and there in the book in memory of the man and his work.
During the excavation of the Bronze Age Palace at Knossos at the beginning of the twentieth century Arthur Evans found hundreds of inscribed clay tablets, written in two different (but similar) scripts which he called Linear A and Linear B. Evans was prone to odd ideas (controversially he rebuilt and repainted parts of the excavated palace) and in a dog in the forest way he declared that the inhabitants of ancient Crete were not Greek and that the language used to write the tablets was not Greek.
Thus began a fifty year period of speculation and attempts at decoding the tablets. Unsurprisingly given Evans' authoritative statement that the tablets were not written in Greek, they were linked to any and all languages known to have been in use around the eastern Mediterranean.
Speculation and grand ideas are all well and good, but the strength of this book lies in the explanation of the work involved in the analysis of the tablets. What signs were used. How frequently each was used. What were the patterns of usage.
The focus of the book is on the work that Micheal Ventris did in his free time - his day job was designing schools as an architect for the UK ministry of Education in the brave new world of the 1950s. But even before he took up Linear B as a hobby in 1950, other scholars had been working on the system of weights and measures used, gender and some patterns of usage in the linear B tablets. So from basic analysis it was possible to conclude that the tablets were written in a syllabary, not an alphabet, or in pictographs, and which signs where likely to be vowels and which represented numbers and so on.
All of this was done without computers. Everything had to be done by hand. Recognising signs used by eye and remembering where one had seen something before.
In one way it was a help that researchers only had access to a few hundred tablets (although as it turned out not all the printed reproductions were entirely accurate), although at the same time the larger the body of texts the greater the chance of successful decipherment. Linear A is still undeciphered for that reason, too few texts at all, or too many short texts.
The book then follows through the efforts of Ventris, and eventually the author of this book, to crack the code, decipher the script and establish the language that it was written in. Much to Ventris' surprise Greek seemed to best fit. The initial problem was that the language used in the tablets was Mycenaean Greek. A form of the Greek language unknown apart from the evidence of the tablets themselves. This was language a thousand years (give or take a couple of years) older than the next most recent written form of the language. The odd co-incidence of written forms with obscure usage from the Iliad pleases Chadwick and in the way that evidence does, disproved some theories on what early forms of Greek might have been like.
Finally we are left with the picture of the Mycenaean world that emerges from the Linear B texts. And the written world of the heroes of Homer is the world of bean counters. The documents are largely stores records. How many chariot wheels are in stock or the size of flocks. Accountancy and bookkeeping - such are the origins of European culture!
Ventris died in a car crash in 1956 and so alongside the story of the decryption and the excitement of discovering the world described on the tablets there is the acknowledgement of the loss of a scholar. Tributes to his modesty, aptitude for languages and even to his penmanship "he was a first-rate draughtsman, and his handwriting had the regularity and clarity of printing, without, however, being devoid of character" are scattered here and there in the book in memory of the man and his work.
March 27, 2024
“The languages and remains of pre-Hellenic writings represent one of the most intriguing problems in modern archaeology. The decipherment of Linear B is the report of the unavoidable archaeological and philological discovery that, in the 1950s, revealed the key that would lead to the understanding of the secrets of the Minoan civilization.”
March 14, 2020
How can a book about decipherment be interesting? Well, this book can. It reads like a detective novel and gives a great insight in cracking one of the most remarkable writing code of the 20th century.
It offers a good background about the three basic ways in which a writing style can be created. Ideographic writing uses pictograms to describe a whole word, this is how the Chinese writing style was created. The big problem of course is that although some symbols might be recognisable (man, horse and so on) it says nothing about the pronunciation. The other two systems use elements that represent the sound of the words being used. They may be either whole syllables (pronounceable) or singe letters (partly unpronounceable abstractions). This has the advantage that much less symbols are needed, but still - especially when a whole syllable is used (like Japanese) there may be a lot of symbols.
When turning to the Linear B texts, the amount of symbols showed that it probably consists of whole syllables, with here and there some obvious ideograms attached to it. So the effort had to be to distinguish the ideograms from the syllables. Luckily, already in 1950, the numerals were already distinguishable.
Based upon this, there were various efforts undertaken to decipher the texts, all with different sorts of success. The most promising one was the work of Alice E. Kober. By checking whether the language was using different endings to express grammatical forms, the use of plurals and distinguishing gender she was able to assemble various words into triplets, which played a big role into the final decipherment.
All the time, based on Evan’s work and theory, the understanding was that Linear B was a completely independent language, not relating to any Greek language at that time.
In 1940 Michael Ventris (an architect) started his work on the decipherment, by way of an hobby. It wasn’t until 1952 that he realised that the Minoan language could be Greek.
By carefully checking all symbols, grouping them based on Kober’s work and checking connections between different symbols, he was able to deduce some of the sounds that could be represented by the symbols. He was able to distinguish certain names of cities and add the sounds, and suddenly realised these names sounded similar to some old Greek city names and places. Wasn’t the Minoan language then Greek after all?
In 1952, Ventris had the feeling that the code had been broken. He was now convinced that the language used was in fact Greek, which was totally against the conviction of that time and against the conviction of some notable Greek history academics.
In this he approached John Chadwick, who came quickly convinced of the theory. In 1953 they published an article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies which was the beginning of the acceptance of the decipherment of Linear B.
In this book, John Chadwick relates his story, his friendship with Michael Ventris and his respect for the man. Not only gives he great insight in how the decipherment actually was done, but also honours the man himself, Michael Ventris who - as a mere architect - was able to stun the academic world with his amazing decipherment.
It offers a good background about the three basic ways in which a writing style can be created. Ideographic writing uses pictograms to describe a whole word, this is how the Chinese writing style was created. The big problem of course is that although some symbols might be recognisable (man, horse and so on) it says nothing about the pronunciation. The other two systems use elements that represent the sound of the words being used. They may be either whole syllables (pronounceable) or singe letters (partly unpronounceable abstractions). This has the advantage that much less symbols are needed, but still - especially when a whole syllable is used (like Japanese) there may be a lot of symbols.
When turning to the Linear B texts, the amount of symbols showed that it probably consists of whole syllables, with here and there some obvious ideograms attached to it. So the effort had to be to distinguish the ideograms from the syllables. Luckily, already in 1950, the numerals were already distinguishable.
Based upon this, there were various efforts undertaken to decipher the texts, all with different sorts of success. The most promising one was the work of Alice E. Kober. By checking whether the language was using different endings to express grammatical forms, the use of plurals and distinguishing gender she was able to assemble various words into triplets, which played a big role into the final decipherment.
All the time, based on Evan’s work and theory, the understanding was that Linear B was a completely independent language, not relating to any Greek language at that time.
In 1940 Michael Ventris (an architect) started his work on the decipherment, by way of an hobby. It wasn’t until 1952 that he realised that the Minoan language could be Greek.
By carefully checking all symbols, grouping them based on Kober’s work and checking connections between different symbols, he was able to deduce some of the sounds that could be represented by the symbols. He was able to distinguish certain names of cities and add the sounds, and suddenly realised these names sounded similar to some old Greek city names and places. Wasn’t the Minoan language then Greek after all?
In 1952, Ventris had the feeling that the code had been broken. He was now convinced that the language used was in fact Greek, which was totally against the conviction of that time and against the conviction of some notable Greek history academics.
In this he approached John Chadwick, who came quickly convinced of the theory. In 1953 they published an article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies which was the beginning of the acceptance of the decipherment of Linear B.
In this book, John Chadwick relates his story, his friendship with Michael Ventris and his respect for the man. Not only gives he great insight in how the decipherment actually was done, but also honours the man himself, Michael Ventris who - as a mere architect - was able to stun the academic world with his amazing decipherment.
January 22, 2015
Illustrations
Preface
--The Decipherment of Linear B (Second Edition)
Postscript
Appendix: Mycenaean Tablets in Transcription
Index
Preface
--The Decipherment of Linear B (Second Edition)
Postscript
Appendix: Mycenaean Tablets in Transcription
Index
September 3, 2015
The Twentieth Century saw the decipherment of two hieroglyphic languages, Mayan and the proto-Greek Linear B. John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B is the story of the latter. In collaboration with Michael Ventris, Chadwick proved that Linear B was an early form of Greek used in Crete and throughout lands under control of Mycenae.
Is there any chance of a literature written in Linear B. Not according to Chadwick in a 1992 Postscript:
Is there any chance of a literature written in Linear B. Not according to Chadwick in a 1992 Postscript:
Looked at from the point of view of our modern alphabets it may well seem strange that the Greeks of the Mycenaean Age were content with so ill-adapted a system. But we must remember, and the evidence goes on increasing, that the Mycenaeans never used Linear B except for accounts, inventories and similar brief notes; there is no example of continuous prose, which would demand a system providing an accurate notation of inflexional elements; the script is appropriate to its actual use, which is no more than an elaborate kind of mnemonic device.While the book comes across as dry unless one has a photocopy of the appendixes in front of him or her while reading the text, it is one of the great true tales of detection of the last hundred years.
May 9, 2022
Fantastic book, tracing the discovery and eventual decipherment of the Linear B script found in Greece, mainly on the island of Crete, and then giving an overview of what we know about the polity from both the translated tablets and the archaeological discoveries. Success has many fathers, but the greatest credit here goes to an English professional architect and amateur linguist, Michael Ventris, with some able assists by Alice Kobler (who sadly died shortly before Ventris's breakthrough) and John Chadwick, the author of this book.
Ventris himself died shortly before the publication (with Chadwick) of his definitive scholarly book on the subject, Documents in Mycenaean Greek - a great shame, for we do not know what else he might have accomplished.
While written for the amateur reader, the book does a fantastic job explaining the technical details of how the translation was accomplished and the true nature of the language was unlocked - a Greek dialect, to everyone's surprise. I believe the details of Mycenaean life to be mostly still current; not much has changed since the second edition of the book (1970), and for that matter, changes between the original publication date in the 1950s and the 2nd edition are handled with a single chapter at the end. (*) More material is needed, but as time goes on, we'll be finding less and less of it. And even a great expansion in the corpus of documents is unlikely to give us the details we want of their society -- Chadwick believed it unlikely that anything more than short messages and inventories were written in Linear B, and for that matter, the method by which the script was written suggests tha would have been substantial use of even more perishable materials, giving the argument that the fine details of the characters written on the clay tablets would be so time consuming that no-one would have bothered continuing with them unless they were also writing out those fine details on papyrus or parchment.
The traditional British education system comes in for criticism -- some just and some unjust -- but one thing that is difficult to criticize is its propensity for producing terrific writers, and Chadwick was one of those. I will be keeping an eye out for more of his books.
(*) It would be nice to have yet another edition of The Decipherment of Linear B, not only to bring in results from the last fifty years, but also because the technical process of printing is more advanced. The Mycenaean characters are referred to by reference number to a chart, because at the time, including the characters themselves into the body of the text would have required a prohibitive amount of work to create and typeset the fonts.
Ventris himself died shortly before the publication (with Chadwick) of his definitive scholarly book on the subject, Documents in Mycenaean Greek - a great shame, for we do not know what else he might have accomplished.
While written for the amateur reader, the book does a fantastic job explaining the technical details of how the translation was accomplished and the true nature of the language was unlocked - a Greek dialect, to everyone's surprise. I believe the details of Mycenaean life to be mostly still current; not much has changed since the second edition of the book (1970), and for that matter, changes between the original publication date in the 1950s and the 2nd edition are handled with a single chapter at the end. (*) More material is needed, but as time goes on, we'll be finding less and less of it. And even a great expansion in the corpus of documents is unlikely to give us the details we want of their society -- Chadwick believed it unlikely that anything more than short messages and inventories were written in Linear B, and for that matter, the method by which the script was written suggests tha would have been substantial use of even more perishable materials, giving the argument that the fine details of the characters written on the clay tablets would be so time consuming that no-one would have bothered continuing with them unless they were also writing out those fine details on papyrus or parchment.
The traditional British education system comes in for criticism -- some just and some unjust -- but one thing that is difficult to criticize is its propensity for producing terrific writers, and Chadwick was one of those. I will be keeping an eye out for more of his books.
(*) It would be nice to have yet another edition of The Decipherment of Linear B, not only to bring in results from the last fifty years, but also because the technical process of printing is more advanced. The Mycenaean characters are referred to by reference number to a chart, because at the time, including the characters themselves into the body of the text would have required a prohibitive amount of work to create and typeset the fonts.
July 6, 2012
During the Iron Age, the island of Cyprus did not use the common Greek alphabet, but rather its own syllabary, which was deciphered in the 19th century thanks to bilingual inscriptions in Greek in this script and in Phoenician. This syllabary seems to have been designed for a language with a consonant-vowel syllable structure, like Japanese, which does not work well for Greek, which has words like anthropos; the script accommodated such words by using silent vowels. In the early 20th century, excavations in Crete found tablets from the Bronze Age in two scripts, named Linear A and Linear B; later Linear B was also found on the Greek mainland. Linear B had obvious numerals (1, 2, 10, 20, 100, 200...), units of measure, obvious logograms (man, woman, horse, pig, chariot, tripod vessel...) and about 90 characters - too few for ideographic writing, and too many for an alphabet or an abjad. Matching them with the Iron Age Cypriot script did not lead anywhere; it was not clear, what language these tablets were written in, but suppose the two syllabaries were built on the same principles? Then an American woman scholar realized that many words in the script are the same except for the last few characters, which may indicate a language with case endings (e.g. nominative - anthropos, genitive - anthropou...). What if the first characters of different endings have the same consonant but different vowels? In the early 1950s, the author and another classicist, an architect who was a navigator in the RAF during World War II, built up a grid of classes of syllables thus related; there were five such classes corresponding to five vowels. When they found likely toponyms such as Knossos and plugged them into the grid, what emerged was an early form of ancient Greek, as far from classical Greek as Beowulf is from Shakespeare! Unlike the Iron Age syllabary, it dropped the final consonant. Many classical scholars questioned their analysis, but then another batch of tablets was excavated; on one tablet the picture of a tripod was accompanied by syllables ti-ri-po (tripos in classical Greek), two tripods - by ti-ri-po-de (tripodes, the dual number in classical Greek), a vessel with four handles - by qe-to-ro-we (in classical Greek, four is tetra, but in other IE languages the first consonant is k; -owe is owes, or ear), a vessel with three handles - by ti-ri-o-we-e and another - by ti-ri-jo-we, and a vessel with no handles - by a-no-we. Although the corpus of writing in this script is limited to administrative records of Bronze Age palaces, this is the language spoken by Homer's heroes. It has the consonant q in some places where classical Greek has p (e.g. man is a-to-ro-qo, horse is i-qo, but then the Latin aqua became apă in Romanian). This was a less complicated operation than the almost contemporaneous breaking of the Enigma, but it was carried out by fewer people with less resources. Linear A remains undeciphered to this day.
June 22, 2024
jestem lingwistyczną wróżką
November 4, 2024
A gripping and informative read.
In this short volume, John Chadwick, one of the main characters in the exciting series of events leading up to the cracking of the code, tells us in an illuminating way how scholars managed to read the Mycanean script. The explanations behind the methods used are fascinating and clearly explained.
The story is of great appeal. We are presented with a nice puzzle, whose solution leads us to understand some of the earliest writing of a European culture. I never thought an inventory would make me feel this deeply.
In this short volume, John Chadwick, one of the main characters in the exciting series of events leading up to the cracking of the code, tells us in an illuminating way how scholars managed to read the Mycanean script. The explanations behind the methods used are fascinating and clearly explained.
The story is of great appeal. We are presented with a nice puzzle, whose solution leads us to understand some of the earliest writing of a European culture. I never thought an inventory would make me feel this deeply.
June 15, 2012
Linear B is the alphabet (or syllabet) of the tablets found at Knossos on Crete and subsequently around Mycenaea on the Balkan peninsula. This book is the "popular" version of the academic volume initially published by Michael Ventris, the person who actually succeeded in deciphering Linear B, and John Chadwick, who supplied the linguistic grounding to demonstrate that Ventris's discovery actually worked. There are sufficient details to give the "popular" version sufficient depth to follow the process, rather than just having to accept the author's declarations. For the most part of the discussion, Chadwick does not reproduce the letters of Linear B, partially for technical printing reasons, but it is also helpful in that the reader is not required to memorize a whole new alphabet (though, obviously you may do so if you wish to). Instead he provides each letter with a number and a handy chart by which one can find the original cipher represented by the number. Ventris's method was intriguing and rather complex, and Chadwick does an excellent job presenting it clearly. The big issue was in which language the Linear B tablets were written, and the most likely candidate in the eyes of previous scholarship was--Etruscan, or a close relative. The reason for this choice was in part that most people were looking for a geographically close non-IndoEuropean, non-Semitic language. I won't give away what it actually turned out to be. I wonder if we'll get to read a book about the decipherment of the earlier script, Linear A, in my life time.
August 11, 2007
This is the true story of how ancient tablets in a forgotten ancient Greek language "Linear B" was deciphered.
This book was interesting, but it was very hard to read. The reading is very dense, but the subject matter is very interesting.
I read this book because it shows an interesting application of cryptanalytic techniques to a non cryptology related field. I was told it was a good book for people who study cryptology to read.
This book was interesting, but it was very hard to read. The reading is very dense, but the subject matter is very interesting.
I read this book because it shows an interesting application of cryptanalytic techniques to a non cryptology related field. I was told it was a good book for people who study cryptology to read.
July 29, 2019
Wonderful account of the decipherment of Linear B, from the very beginning to the very end, magnificently narrated as a suspense story!
Great deeds by great men (Evans, Ventris and Chadwick) and a great woman (Alice Kober).
Great deeds by great men (Evans, Ventris and Chadwick) and a great woman (Alice Kober).
April 8, 2019
This is still the best introduction to the earliest known form of Greek.
May 14, 2023
This book by John Chadwick is over 70 years old and tells the account of the decoding of the Linear B Mycenaean language, which turned out to be Greek. It's a fascinating story as there was no equivalent of the Rosetta stone, so everything had to be figured out by Michael Ventris, an amateur, who actually had a full-time job as an architect.
After going down several blind alleys in attempts to crack the language, Ventris began to consider that Linear B was a syllabic script, in which each symbol represented a combination of a consonant and a vowel sound. He also used statistical analysis to identify recurring patterns of symbols in the script, which he believed represented common words such as "king" and "chariot".
John Chadwick, the author of this book, and an expert in Greek, then worked with Ventris, and they wrote a joint paper outlining their theory, which eventually came to be accepted, despite some reluctance from the establishment at the time. Sadly Ventris died shortly afterwards in a car accident and Chadwick had to write this account and continue to make progress in subsequent years.
All this was done in the 1950s without the aid of computers. Nobody has ever managed to decipher its predecessor Linear A, even with the aid of computers.
After going down several blind alleys in attempts to crack the language, Ventris began to consider that Linear B was a syllabic script, in which each symbol represented a combination of a consonant and a vowel sound. He also used statistical analysis to identify recurring patterns of symbols in the script, which he believed represented common words such as "king" and "chariot".
John Chadwick, the author of this book, and an expert in Greek, then worked with Ventris, and they wrote a joint paper outlining their theory, which eventually came to be accepted, despite some reluctance from the establishment at the time. Sadly Ventris died shortly afterwards in a car accident and Chadwick had to write this account and continue to make progress in subsequent years.
All this was done in the 1950s without the aid of computers. Nobody has ever managed to decipher its predecessor Linear A, even with the aid of computers.
October 1, 2024
En af de mest intresante indblik i knækningen af linear B. Bogen formår at komme helt ind på handlingerne der førte til knækningen af linear B, pga. forfatterens tætte samarbejde med Ventris. Samtidigt giver Chadwick solide men også let forståelige forklaringer af skriftsprogets opbygning, der gør at man ikke føler sig helt lost på emnet hvis oprindelse og forståelse som bogen prøver at give dig indblik i. Syntes også at kapitlet der reflekterede over hvad tavlerne kunne sige om datidens liv var interesant, pga Chadwicks konstante sammenligninger med Homers portrætteringer af samme kultur.
Jeg var også meget vild med Chadwicks små afsnit om deres kritikere, men de leder også ind i bogens største problem som et akademisk værk, hvilket er Chadwicks meget tydelige personlige stemme samt hans bias, som påvirker meget af hans portrættering af andre forskere. Det var meget underholdende og han er en god fortæller, men det gør at man kan stille stort spørgsmålstegn ved værkets objektivitet.
Jeg var også meget vild med Chadwicks små afsnit om deres kritikere, men de leder også ind i bogens største problem som et akademisk værk, hvilket er Chadwicks meget tydelige personlige stemme samt hans bias, som påvirker meget af hans portrættering af andre forskere. Det var meget underholdende og han er en god fortæller, men det gør at man kan stille stort spørgsmålstegn ved værkets objektivitet.
November 26, 2025
Short and sweet, a neat book about the breakthrough written by one of its main contributors. It's an interesting case study in how false assumptions can lead you astray if you're not willing to question them. It's amazing how deep-seated the belief was that the language of Linear B couldn't have been Greek. The latter chapters also delve into the interplay between linguistics and archaeology, and how the written word can tell us so much about the material culture of a time and place (and likewise how an understanding of the material culture was essential to the decipherment of the script).
All in all, the author has written a charming tribute to his friend and collaborator Michael Ventris, who seems to have had a remarkable mind. It's amazing to think the impact that a layman was able to achieve in such a seemingly ivory-tower field.
All in all, the author has written a charming tribute to his friend and collaborator Michael Ventris, who seems to have had a remarkable mind. It's amazing to think the impact that a layman was able to achieve in such a seemingly ivory-tower field.
October 9, 2025
Very interesting! Makes me want to find an undeciphered script and work on it.
The strategies employed to decipher Linear B are very well explained. You really need to approach such a problem logically without prejudice against whatever you may find, which is apparently difficult when you have expectations based on archeological finds for instance.
It's very nice to see how archeologists and linguists work together to uncover parts of our history.
The strategies employed to decipher Linear B are very well explained. You really need to approach such a problem logically without prejudice against whatever you may find, which is apparently difficult when you have expectations based on archeological finds for instance.
It's very nice to see how archeologists and linguists work together to uncover parts of our history.
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January 24, 2021No me lo he leído entero xd solo un apartado para clase pero hija así me aclaro más que luego me creo que no leo nada Y NO ES ASÍ
June 21, 2024
Un clásico de la divulgación y de la arqueología del mundo griego. Café para los muy cafeteros, sí, pero qué bien sabe.
August 24, 2020
Interesantísimo relato acerca de cómo se descifró el Lineal-B por uno de los lingüistas que lo lograron. Aunque parezca un libro "de letras" tiene mucha ciencia detrás y mucho en común con disciplinas como la Paleontología (sí, estoy enfermo y no voy a ocultarme a estas alturas).
Leído por culpa de escuchar a Neferchitty en Coffeebreak 😅
Leído por culpa de escuchar a Neferchitty en Coffeebreak 😅
January 20, 2019
My undergrad degree was in Greek & Roman and I read the 2nd edition of this absorbing intellectual detective story when it was first published. Fifty years later, it’s still a great read. “Linear B” is one of the two languages discovered by Sir Arthur Evans in his excavations on Crete in the early 20th century (the other being “Linear A”). Like many early languages, it was written in a heavily pictorial form, but it wasn’t clear whether the figures used were similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs, or syllabic in nature. Scholars struggled with the problem for years. Then along came Michael Ventris, who was an architect, not an academic, but was also a talented “hobbyist” paleographer with a string of publications that began when he was only eighteen. Ventris tackled the problem in partnership with Chadwick, who taught Greek at Cambridge and was a member of the British Academy, and had worked on the Japanese naval codes at Bletchley Park during the war. And together they figured out that Linear B actually represented a very early form of Greek, but written in the pictographs used by Linear A. This suggested to them that “B” was the written form of the language used by the Mycenaean invaders of Minoan Crete, which is now the recognized interpretation.
And then Ventris was killed in an auto accident in 1956, at the age of thirty-four, only weeks before the publication of the team’s first findings. A couple years later, Chadwick wrote a fascinating and not-lengthy account for the general reader of their quest for the solution to one of the great linguistic problems of the past century. If you have any interest in the ancient Mediterranean, or in language, or even just in codes and ciphers, you’ll enjoy it.
And then Ventris was killed in an auto accident in 1956, at the age of thirty-four, only weeks before the publication of the team’s first findings. A couple years later, Chadwick wrote a fascinating and not-lengthy account for the general reader of their quest for the solution to one of the great linguistic problems of the past century. If you have any interest in the ancient Mediterranean, or in language, or even just in codes and ciphers, you’ll enjoy it.
November 30, 2015
This is one of my favourite books. I used it many times in a course called "The Human Discovery" both as a General Ed and an Honours class. The course was designed to introduce students to books written by people who had made important/interesting discoveries and written a book describing the process. Other books included "The Piltdown Hoax" by J. S. Weiner who did much work on it and "The Double Helix" by James Watson concerning the discovery of the structure of DNA.
This book is about the work on an ancient script of an unknown language with unknown values for the various symbols. Like the other books, it describes the dismal failures and eventual success of discovering that Linear B was the writing system of the ancient Mycenaean Greeks - those of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." The best early work was done by Alice Kober of the U of Chicago who acted like a scientist and asked three simple questions: 1. Did the language have suffixes. 2. Did the language have gender? 3. Did the language have number (singular and plural)? This was a crucial breakthrough. Th book concentrates on the major work done by the brilliant architect Michael Ventris and his professional accomplice and author, John Chadwick. It is a detective story on how hard work, smart work, broke the code. You will like the book if you like the following joke:
A Roman walks into a taberna and orders a martinum. The bartender asks, "Do you mean a martini?"The Roman responds, "If I wanted a double I would have asked for it."
Enjoy.
This book is about the work on an ancient script of an unknown language with unknown values for the various symbols. Like the other books, it describes the dismal failures and eventual success of discovering that Linear B was the writing system of the ancient Mycenaean Greeks - those of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." The best early work was done by Alice Kober of the U of Chicago who acted like a scientist and asked three simple questions: 1. Did the language have suffixes. 2. Did the language have gender? 3. Did the language have number (singular and plural)? This was a crucial breakthrough. Th book concentrates on the major work done by the brilliant architect Michael Ventris and his professional accomplice and author, John Chadwick. It is a detective story on how hard work, smart work, broke the code. You will like the book if you like the following joke:
A Roman walks into a taberna and orders a martinum. The bartender asks, "Do you mean a martini?"The Roman responds, "If I wanted a double I would have asked for it."
Enjoy.
February 3, 2020
Simply one of the finest books I have read. The decipherment of Linear B is a thrilling enough subject not to require further attractions. Yet the very human story of both Ventris’ genius and the community of academics who attempted (and still attempt) to understand this script and it’s authors is compelling. The one thing missing is, understandably, a nod towards John Chadwick’s own central part in this field. The complements of modesty he pays towards Ventris apply equally to himself.
February 4, 2020
At least one star of the rating is for the accomplishment of deciphering Linear B, and although parts of the book were (as could be expected) dry and technical, parts were really interesting.
June 19, 2018
If you want to read about the decipherment of Linear B then this book is the motherlode. The author was a Bletchley Park code-breaker who worked with Ventris on the decipherment, so this is a first hand account. The central part of the book where he describes the breakthrough reads almost like a memoir. Some (most) of the linguistics went over my head, but even if the fine detail of the argument is missed you can still follow it and the story.
He also gives an overview of Mycenaean studies pre-decipherment and discusses the implications of what was found written on the tablets. It was still a controversial topic when this book was published and I particularly enjoyed how he would dismiss the opinions of other experts as 'absurd'.
A quick note on editions. There are two, the second being published in 1967 with corrections and a postscript so get that one unless you're a first edition junkie.
He also gives an overview of Mycenaean studies pre-decipherment and discusses the implications of what was found written on the tablets. It was still a controversial topic when this book was published and I particularly enjoyed how he would dismiss the opinions of other experts as 'absurd'.
A quick note on editions. There are two, the second being published in 1967 with corrections and a postscript so get that one unless you're a first edition junkie.
February 9, 2011
I ended up pressing this book on everyone I know who's even vaguely interested in linguists, that's how much I liked it. It aims to be pretty much a layman's guide to Linear B, and I reckon it does that very well. My experience in Ancient Greek is limited to two years watching the Storyteller videos and pretending to learn grammar, but I promise you don't even need that - everything relevant is translated. Whilst it's not a comprehensive guide, it's very interesting reading, and has rather persuaded me to pick up something more detailed on the subject (because I have a great fondness for dead languages - no one can tell how bad your accent is!). Chadwick's writing style is very readable - in fact, it reads more like a long newspaper article than a scholarly essay - and full of adorable digressions into Just How Awesome Michael Ventris Really Is.
March 24, 2018
Chadwick's fascinating discussion of the work of Michael Ventris and himself, who together completed the first decoding of the script known as Linear B, which proved to be the written form of Myceneaen Greek. Although this book is more than 50 years old, its tale of the exploration of one of the oldest known written languages is fascinating and evocative, especially when one considers the distance in time to which a language used in the 1400s BCE pushes the very idea of written records of the human experience. A great book for philhellenes, aspiring archaeologists, or anyone who just enjoys a good blend of history and the detective novel. There have been good books on the Mycenaeans since, but understanding how we know their language and some surprisingly small (and tantalisingly vague) details of the daily life of people who lived more than 3,000 years ago is a worthwhile endeavour.
February 21, 2008
Great book for people intersted in historical linguistics. It tells the story of Michael Ventris, a professional architect and amateur linguist, proved that the ancient "Linear B" script was used to write a form of archaic Greek. Particularly interesting is that he himself didn't believe it was possible. He subscribed to the prevailing view at the time, that Linear B was user to write a non-Indo-European language, perhaps a relative of Etruscan. The preponderance of evidence from his own investigation convinced him that it was Greek, and although many experts on Ancient Greek disputed his claims, he was proven right in the end.
The book contains many exaples of the script, with transliterations and comparisons to corresponding Classical Greek words.
The book contains many exaples of the script, with transliterations and comparisons to corresponding Classical Greek words.
August 16, 2010
This book details how an unknown Minoan script was deciphered without having any type of Rosetta stone. The author is a co-contributor of the main decipherer, Michael Ventris. Ventris was a child prodigy of languages who died shortly after his cracking the language code. The book is a Homage by Chadwick and for the process of devolving (?) a language.
This book covers more of the process on how the deciphering was approached and offers up a number of interesting incites in how languages have been known to be created (pictogram, alphabetic, or syllabary).
An interesting note is how the solution is accepted. Regardless of the results, there's still persuading to be done in the academic world.
This book covers more of the process on how the deciphering was approached and offers up a number of interesting incites in how languages have been known to be created (pictogram, alphabetic, or syllabary).
An interesting note is how the solution is accepted. Regardless of the results, there's still persuading to be done in the academic world.
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