An Architect Cracked Linear B at 30 by Refusing to Believe It Was a Lost Language

Linear B is the syllabic script Arthur Evans first dug up at Knossos in 1900, written on clay tablets that had been baked accidentally when the Mycenaean palaces burned around 1200 BC. Evans assumed the language behind the script was something pre-Greek, lost, related to no known tongue. He did not live to be wrong about that.

Michael Ventris was a 14-year-old British schoolboy in 1936 when he attended a lecture Evans was giving at Burlington House in London. He asked Evans afterward whether Linear B had been deciphered. Evans said no. Ventris decided he would do it himself. He went on to study architecture, served as a navigator in the RAF during the war, and pursued the script as a private hobby on the side. The decisive insight came in 1951–52: Ventris noticed that certain three-syllable signs appeared at the end of certain words in patterns consistent with the case endings of an inflected language. Working from American classicist Alice Kober's earlier statistical groundwork, he tested the hypothesis that the underlying language was a very early form of Greek. The grids resolved. Place names — Knossos, Amnisos, Pylos — fell into place.

Ventris announced the solution on a BBC radio broadcast on July 1, 1952. The Cambridge classicist John Chadwick, listening at home, immediately wrote to him; their joint paper appeared in 1953, and the book Documents in Mycenaean Greek was already at the printer in 1956. On September 6 of that year, weeks before publication, Ventris's car struck a parked lorry on the A1 in Hatfield. He was 34. The deciphered script forced a several-century revision of when Greek-speakers had arrived in the Aegean.