Linear B . Now the extraordinary thing about Ventris is that he was neither an archaeologist, like Arthur Evans, nor a classicist, like Alice Kober, nor a scholar in any other
Linear B , it turned out, recorded a very early dialect of Greek, spoken long before Hellenic peoples were known to
linear B in my Sydney and Greece is not used again after the collapse of the Mycenaeans.
So Linear B was unquestionably a writing system.
any Linear B character.
The Linear B syllabic writing system or syllabary, as it's known, was what's called a CV type of syllabary.
But Linear B , in finding the Linear B archive, Arthur Evans had basically unearthed the record room, the account books
Did Linear B have a system of inscribing numbers using figures as well?
The linear B never mentions contacts with Egypt or the Hittites, whatever.
determine what language Linear B recorded, how any of its characters was pronounced, or what virtually any of its words meant.
character of Linear B in every inscription then known-- a character's frequency at the beginnings of words, the middles of words, the ends of words, its frequency in
In the Linear B examples, as in the Spanish, the highlighted portions of the words are the inflections, and the un-highlighted portions are the stems to which the
characters of Linear B . And this was her second great discovery.
What happened is Linear B , we now know, records what is called Mycenaean Greek, the language of Bronze Age era
Why is it Linear B ?
Evans named the writing system Linear Script Class B, Linear B for short.
But Evans underestimated the formidable challenge Linear B would pose.
When she began her analysis of Linear B , Kober kept her extensive tabulations in a series of notebooks.
Was anything else written in Linear B ?
That's the other amazing thing about Linear B is it was all accomplished entirely by hand without the aid of a single
One has never been found for Linear B to this day.
And that is precisely the situation that the investigators of Linear B found themselves in for five decades after Arthur Evans unearthed those
Fortunately for Evans, Linear B passed this first test handily.
And I should explain that long before the Linear B script could be read, the subject matter of many of the tablets
And here are a few of my favorite Linear B logograms.
And happily, the Linear B tablets have white space to burn.
As a result, Linear B acquired the well-deserved reputation as one of the most intractable puzzles in history.
As Kober approached the far more difficult problem of Linear B , considering form independent of meaning let her spot patterns that others had missed.
one of the enduring small mysteries of the Linear B story.
inspired discovery that of the 85-some characters in Linear B , there were five that came up with seemingly disproportionate frequency at the beginnings of words.
Is there a way of finding a history in Linear B as a script to Greek script?
As Evans could scarcely have imagined in 1900, Linear B would become one of the most tantalizing riddles of the first half of the 20th century, a secret code that
But because history is nearly always written by the victors and the story of Linear B has long been a British masculine
And it was just these methods that ultimately let Michael Ventris decipher Linear B .
And indeed, tablets written in Linear B were subsequently found at several mainland sites.
of his first season's dig, he had unearthed more than 1,000 tablets written in Linear B .
But the one I want to focus on, because it describes the Linear B situation perfectly, is the cell on the lower right
So what did all these elegant diagnostic tests tell Arthur Evans about Linear B ?
And here, too, the Linear B scribes did him a great kindness.
When Evans died in 1941 at the age of 90, the meaning of only a single Linear B word was known.
Then along came Alice Kober, the great unsung heroine of the Linear B decipherment.
And it was there in a class on early Greek life that she appears to have encountered Linear B . She was immediately hooked.
Scholars now agree with that without the painstaking advances she made, Linear B would most likely never have been deciphered when it was, if ever.
enterprise of her life-- the deep, serious business of deciphering Linear B . She was saddled with a heavy teaching load, but night after night,
Now, Kober knew that to solve the riddle of Linear B , a decipherer would have to inhabit a world that was, as
You can see his magnificent architect's penmanship on display in one of the hundreds of Linear B inscriptions he copied by hand.
In June of 1952, after spending more than half his life in the grip of Linear B , Michael Ventris, just shy of
As Evans well knew, many ethnic groups had passed through the Bronze Age Aegean, and there was no way to tell whose language and whose culture Linear B represented.
What she did that was so radical-- for no decipherer of any script in history had done this-- was to treat the symbols of Linear B as abstract objects
Her first great discovery, made in the mid-1940s, was that the language of Linear B , whatever it was, had been an