An Architect Cracked Linear B in His Spare Time
Michael Ventris was 14 when he heard Linear B was undeciphered. By 30 he had cracked it — in evenings, between architectural drawings.
In 1936, a 14-year-old English schoolboy named Michael Ventris went with a class to an exhibition at Burlington House in London. The archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, then 85, was lecturing on a script he had unearthed at Knossos in Crete decades earlier — a syllabary stamped into hundreds of clay tablets, which no one had been able to read. The boy raised his hand to confirm what Evans had just said: Linear B was undeciphered. He decided then to decipher it himself.
He did not become a classicist. Ventris read architecture and worked as an architect for the Ministry of Education designing postwar British schools. Linear B was an evening hobby. Through the 1940s he circulated unofficial "Work Notes" to other enthusiasts, publishing his progress and inviting comment.
The breakthrough came in 1952. Working from a list compiled by the American classicist Alice Kober — who had identified inflectional patterns inside the script before her death in 1950 — Ventris realised the tablets contained Greek place names: Knossos, Pylos, Amnisos, in archaic form. From there the syllabic values he had provisionally assigned all fell into place. The language behind Linear B was Greek, in a form 500 years older than Homer.
He announced the result on BBC Radio on July 1, 1952. The Cambridge classicist John Chadwick wrote to him within days, and together they produced Documents in Mycenaean Greek, the standard reference, in 1956.
Weeks after the book's publication, on the night of September 6, 1956, Ventris drove home late from his in-laws and struck a parked lorry on a dual carriageway in Hatfield. He was 34.
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