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The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris

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Linear B was a script of unknown language that appeared in bits and pieces in archaelogical digs in an around Greece. Nobody could decipher it; in fact, they couldn't even agree on what language the script represented. Andrew Robinson tells the fascinating story of Michael Ventris, the architect/amateur linguist who 'cracked' the code of Linear B and proved to the world that it contained an ancient form of Greek.

The story unfolds with the same drama as a murder mystery or detective story. Robinson makes what could have been a complicated story eloquent and clear.

Although I recommend this book highly, at the end of it I still felt in the dark about Ventris himself. He seems to have been a great eccentric and very private individual. His sudden death at the age of 34 seems to have occurred under a cloud of deep depression that Robinson does not really explain. Linear B may be deciphered, but Ventris is still a mystery.

Michael Ventris was a brilliant linguist who solved a top-notch archeological puzzle. The extent of his accomplishment and his peculiar and likable personality are well shown in _The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris_ (Thames & Hudson) by Andrew Robinson. Ventris's accomplishment was an intellectual breakthrough ranking with the victory of Champollion over hieroglyphics, and unlike Champollion, he had no Rosetta Stone guide him in translations. His victory was over the squiggles on clay tablets unearthed at Knossos on Crete.

Ventris became intrigued by the decipherment as a schoolboy, even furtively studying the language by flashlight under his bedsheets at school. He modestly explained years later, "Some of us thought it would be a change from our set lessons to try and decipher the tablets, but of course we didn' t get anywhere. Somehow I've remained interested in the problem ever since." He did not then, of course, have the academic credentials to tackle such a task, but he never got them. He was a brilliant linguist, picking up languages quickly and speaking like a native, but he had no training in language or the classics; he never even went to university. He trained as an architect, and for all his short life, he split his endeavors between architecture and Linear B. Robinson maintains that the decipherment was helped by Ventris's training in architecture. The book is excellent at showing the difficult assignment Ventris gave himself, using good analogies with English words to make the puzzle as plain as possible for non-linguists. It shows the importance of hunches and inspiration, as well as cold logic. Ventris solved what is probably the greatest challenge in deciphering any ancient language, and though the achievement was magnificent, the fruits were meager: there is no literature in the language, no epic poetry, no sparkling civilization. The tablets are inventories and lists of possessions such as urns and goats.

Ventris was a gently humorous but private man who remains an enigma in many ways, and was so to the people who knew him. Having abandoned further work on Linear B, he also abandoned the assignment he was pursuing in architecture at the same time. He died in a car crash at the age of 34. Robinson is full of admiration for Ventris's astonishing accomplishment, and this book shows just how remarkable an achievement it was. It is not only an excellent small biography, but an introduction to a magnificent intellectual triumph.

This is a book about a great achievement and a great man, but it is also a deeply frustrating account of both. It purports to be about Michael Ventris, the man who deciphered Linear B and showed it to be archaic Greek, and only secondarily about the details of the decipherment and what it revealed about the Mycenaean world. In fact the book is best on the details of the decipherment and rather poor on the details of Ventris's life. On the Mycenaean world it is almost non-existent. Robinson does a good job of bringing the architectural career of Ventris out of the shadows, and even linking it up to the decipherment, but the book is so sketchy about the facts of Ventris's marriage and the life of his parents that this can't really count as an account of Ventris's life at all. When did his father die and what did he die of?; what caused his parents to divorce?; why was Ventris's wife so chronically uninterested in his devotion to the decipherment?; what were her interests, and who were her friends? -- the list of unanswered questions goes on and on.

The great revelation of the book -- from a biographical point of view -- is that Ventris's death, at the height of his fame, was very likely suicide. Robinson is too reticent to say it that baldly but he lays out the facts and allows the reader to draw the obvious conclusion. But when he left home that night at midnight, only to crash, one hour later, into a parked truck on a road he had no reason to be on, at high speed, there is so much that the reader wants to know that this book will not tell. Had he and his wife quarelled? They were clearly not close by that point, so had she asked for a divorce? Why did she think he left the house at that hour? In fact the figure of Lois Ventris is shadowy beyond all belief. For large parts of the story I wondered if they were still married. There are no good photographs of her; there are no good photographs of his children; there are no photographs of the house that he designed and built; there are no photographs of any of his other design projects.

And the book has some strange biases as well. When Ventris fell out with Myres and Kolber, Ventris reported this at the time as a `huge row' -- presumably with Kolber alone. But Robinson presents his subsequent letter as evidence of a fatal weakness of personality that would manifest again, shortly before his death. What it rather looks to be evidence of is Kolber's unpleasant personality, and Ventris's reaction to it, nothing more. He gracefully withdrew from a project he knew he could not be part of. And what was driving his later withdrawal from his architecture research position looks to be entirely unconnected.

This reader also felt that the non-academic Robinson was entirely too enamoured of the genius, non-academic Ventris doing things that the plodding academics could only dream of. One very quickly wearies of tales of just how dull and unimaginative the academics of Oxford and beyond are. There is the music of axes being ground here. And Robinson is too inclined to set up a straw man of logic versus the flights of imagination in scientific discovery: he seems to have no idea that he is saying something that everyone knows and knows all too well.

So all in all this is a good book, but one that makes you wish that it were twice as good as it is. And now that this "biography" has come out I doubt that we will have a chance for a second book that might have answered the questions that this book leaves so frustratingly unanswered.

Andrew Robinson's "The Man Who Deciphered Linear B" should be dry and academic in the worst possible senses of those words. It is, to the contrary, an utterly fascinating mystery and linguistic puzzle which Robinson lays out methodically for his readers--even those who had little previous interest in linguistic puzzles.

Michael Ventris, the man at the heart of this book, was a rather shy, somewhat diffident man who had trained as an architect and married young. Instead of leading the staid life it seems fate had laid out for him, he spent most of his short adult years working on the Linear B--a tablet found at a Mediterranean archaeological dig, and a tablet which had all but been pronounced indecipherable by many scholars with better credentials than Ventris's. Ventris ignored their conclusions and did eventually decipher the tablet. The story is filled with surprises and sudden discoveries, with disappointments and fortuitous guesses, and so on. It is quite a ride. There is even the occasional spot of humor--as when Ventris was stopped by a suspicious Customs agent who said, "These Pylos Tablets--exactly what ailment is it that they're supposed to relieve?"

I learned a great deal from this book. Among the more memorable nuggets was the fact that an alphabet generally contains between 20 and 40 characters--if there are more than 40 characters, it is probably a syllabary (meaning, a system by which each character represents an entire word rather than just one letter or other element WITHIN a word). I highly recommend this for any student of lost language--and anyone who enjoys a twisty-turny thriller!

One gets to know and understand Michael Ventris in the context of the many social and economic changes that were taking place in England in the years straddling the Second World War. I especially liked how the book highlights the collaborative approach that Michael Ventris adopted to address the problems of deciphering Linear B and his architectural assignments.

The book does an wonderful job of explaining with enough detail, but without overwhelming the casual reader, the administrative and intellectual hurdles that Michael Ventris had to overcome to decipher this ancient system of writing.

I enjoyed it as a great biography but surprisingly also as a source of ideas on how to approach complex management projects ... it is much more readable than a typical project management book.

THE MAN WHO DECIPHERED LINEAR B is, as far as I can tell, the only biography of Michael Ventris. The book covers it all, from his childhood, through his World War II service and early family life, to the days of the decipherment and finally his disillusionment with the subject and early death in an automobile accident.

As a student of linguistics with much interest in the earliest Indo-European languages, I have long been familiar with data from Mycenaean Greece in syllabic transcription. However, I didn't know how Ventris came to breaking the original script. Robinson's biography is therefore a fine resource. At 160 pages, it gives an overview of the life of Ventris and how he cracked the code without wearing out its welcome on a reader still more interested in grammar than in cryptography. Robinson also fascinatingly puts Ventris' life in context, speaking about some of his more notable peers at school, his 15 minutes of fame in the layman's media, and his achievements as an architect.

The decipherment of Linear B is presented in admirably simple terms, sure to prove understand to anyone who is already educated enough to have developed an interest in the topic. The book is liberally sprinkled with figures, from facsimiles of tables to Ventris's own charts. As Robinson is writing for an audience, however, who doesn't necessarily understand Greek, this reader trained in the language found several points where Robinson could have entertainingly expanded on points had he focused on those with knowledge of Greek.

While I wouldn't say that familiarity with Ventris' life is a must for those whose work somehow involves writing systems or Mycenaean Greek, Robison's biography is entertaining enough. The stories of the crotchety scholars who resisted the outsider Ventris' discovers to the point of embarassing themselves is sure to tickle readers aware of the uneasy society within academia.

Those interested in psychological reconstruction or psychoanalytic biography will not like this book.
It is most useful for those with a linguistic interest to see how the author links V's profession with his hobby--although, in the end, the "hobby" dominated.
Also strongly hints at both methodological and personal differences with Alice Kober.
most interesting, quite informative, and a pleasant read.

This book is about half biography and half story of the decipherment. It is important to know that in case someone wanted a straight forward academic decipherment history. With that said, this is a wonderful and interesting story about a man I knew little about. Seeing how his personality affected his work really drives home both his genius and the luck involved in something like this. I could not put it down once I started reading it.

The Man who deciphered Linear B - the story of Michael Ventris, by Andrew Robinson, is a book about the monumental task involved in the decoding and understanding what was written in the 1.200 BC clay tablets found by sir Arthur Evans in 1900 in the island of Crete, the home of the fabled character Minotaur. Many were the obstacles imposed on the many scholars who ventured to crack down the code, to no avail to the great majority of them. The most conspicuos hindrance was the fact that, contrary to what happened in the case of the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs by the French mathematician Jean-François Champollion, there was not a handy Rosetta Stone with bilinguals, that is, with texts to be confuted both in the language to be decoded as in an already known language (Greek, in the case of the Rosetta Stone). To add to the difficulty, the discoverer of the first tablets, Mr.Arthru Evans, was not the team-work type of man, preferring to work alone and hiding from the others scholars almost all the pertinent tablets.

So, the deciphering of the so-called Minoan Linear B scripts was a task compared in its difficulty to the first escalation of Mount Everest and to the discovery of the structure of DNAs, all of them happened in the very same year the professional architect and amateur scholar Michael Ventris announced having first cracked the Minoan code, in 1953. The fundamental enigma was what was the language beneath the Linear B sillabary (different from an alphabet, a sillabary represents pictorally sometimes in just one design syllab sounds, e.g, me, fe, ra, etc.). To everyone's amazement , and even to Michael Ventris himself, who had for a long time contended that the hidden language was Etruscan, a Greek ancient dialect was there all the time, masquaraded by a somewhat similar Cypriot sillabary.

The book has all the ingredients of a best-seller and it is a case in point for the preponderance of group work as against the work of mavericks as Arthur Evans. It is also a proof that Natura non facit saltum and that the Eureka cry not always comes from the ones who are in the front line of research, coming instead from people at the second rank as was the case of Ventris, an architec by formation and practice, who now and then made a dive in that type of reserch. His mixture of intuition and knowledge of the many areas involved proved to be the right one to the cracking of the code. Also, the premature death of Michael Ventris at the age of 34 is a mysterious event that to some people repeats the death by suicide of his depressive Polish and beloved mother ; one has also to remember that the Greek alphabet used today was only used since circa 800 BC, surrounded by the many uncertainties regarding the oral background of Homer works like the Odissey and the Illiad. Was the discovery of such material in Crete and afterwards in mainland Greece to expand the range of research of Greek antiquity?

This is a very good book to anyone interested in the peculiarities of genial men like Michael Ventris and in the origin of languages.

This is a very good book. Buy it and enjoy.