Customer Reviews

The Decipherment of Linear B (Canto)

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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.

This book is one which has an extremely interesting description of the methods used in and the results of deciphering clay tablets which contained what was finally determined to be ancient Greek. I have gone back to reread large parts of it several times, because it is concisely packed with so much information about the development of the Greek language. It contains facts which tell much about Greek history. Did you ever wonder why, compared with other ancient cultures, there are very few Greek Linear B tablets from which to glean information? This scarcity of source material is one of the reasons that Linear B was so hard to translate. This book has the simple but very significant answer, along with glimpses into other cultural traits of the times. It is not a thick book, but what John Chadwick has written speaks volumes. Well worth reading for someone interested in the Greek language and culture.

I really liked this book as an outline of the method used to decipher the Linear B script found at Crete and a few locations on mainland Greece. The author is very well qualified to comment on the decipherment given that he was a key collaborator with Michael Ventris. I found the level of detail to be just right to show the outstanding scholarship achieved by Ventris who was a professional architect, not a Greek Classics college professor; but not so much detail as to detract from the readability of the story.

An absolute must read for people who want to see the fascinating process by which ancient scripts are deciphered. Also points out that to begin to understand the classical world, one must begin with the bronze age. I only wish someone would do a reprint of this book with actual linear B characters in the text itself, rather than numbers

Michael Ventris was a young British architect who, during Word War II, serviced in the RAF Intelligence Office, deciphering German encripted dispatches. Defeated the nazis, he started his very own personal "war" against a new "enemy". The "encripted dispatches" were now the incribed clay tablets of the Mycenean civilization, in "prehistoric" Greece. After a few years, Ventris eventually announced to the word that he "cracked" the ancient Linear B script contained in the Mycenean tablets: they were accounting records, and the language contained in them was an archaic form of Greek! John Chadwick was the first scholar who believed in this discover and, with his help, Ventris won the skepticism and prejudice of the academic world. Thanks to Ventris' decipherment, the beginnig of European written "history" has now moved backwards by nearly one millennium!

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.

Cryptography 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.

I was so glad to see this work, first published 1958, available in the Kindle format, as most Kindle books seem to be either very new (published within a decade) or very old (Dickens' novels, for example). As with other linguistic works offered by Kindle, I downloaded a sample to see if the non-Latin scripts and Latin diacritics show well, but unfortunately the sample, which includes only the preface and the first few pages of Chapter One, doesn't contain any of them so I couldn't judge. I bought it anyway, since I had wanted to read this little classic for some time. The decision proves not a good one: neither the Greek letters, nor the more exotic (from the point of view of an English speaker) diacritics, including the macron, breve and caron, show properly. Instead they appear as disproportionately big images sitting amidst the lines. I think Kindle is actually capable of showing all these diacritics well, as demonstrated in the built-in OED (although it may still take some time for Kindle to display non-Latin scripts properly), so I'm a bit disappointed with this edition, which leaves a lot to be desired typographically. As a big Kindle fan, I realize that sometimes I expect too much from it. I'll be patient, though. Looking forward to an improved rendering of this work, and to the day when I can peruse linguistic works on my Kindle, with the same kind of pleasure derived from my reading novels and history works on it now.

Chadwick was the man who believed in Ventris and his method before everyone else did. Being a Classicist and knowing Greek better than Ventris, whose knowledge was only sketchy and very elementary, he helped tremendously in the decipherment of the language of the Achaean Greeks and their fascinating script, the Linear B. It is a small, precise and very informative little book that reads like a detective novel.

I like ancient worlds, criptography, lost civilizations, history of writing, arqueology, secrets and spies and all of this are in this book.

If anyone, like the reviewer below, would like actually to LEARN some Linear B, the easiest way (short of going to Cambridge or UT Austin) is to get the excellent book Linear B: An Introduction, by J.T. Hooker, which has recently been republished (though you should be well at home with classical and Homeric Greek before you start on Mycenaean). Good luck!