An Architect Cracked Mycenaean Greek in His Spare Time

On 1 July 1952, Michael Ventris went on the BBC Third Programme and described Linear B — the script Arthur Evans had unearthed at Knossos at the turn of the century — as "a difficult and archaic Greek, seeing that it's five hundred years older than Homer, and written in a rather abbreviated form, but Greek nevertheless." Evans had spent his career insisting the language behind the tablets could not possibly be Greek. He had been wrong.

Ventris was an English architect, then 30, with no university classics degree and a day job designing schools. He had been hooked on the script since age 14, when he heard Evans give a lecture. Through the 1940s he kept circulating amateur "Work Notes" to anyone in the field who would read them, including the American classicist Alice Kober, whose grids of recurring sign-pairs had quietly mapped out Linear B's inflectional spine before her death in 1950. Ventris built directly on Kober's tables.

The move that broke it open was a guess about place names. Ventris assumed certain three-sign sequences on the Knossos tablets named Cretan towns — Knossos, Amnisos, Tylissos — and used those to anchor sound values to syllabic signs. The values produced recognizable Greek words: "total," "boy," "shepherd," lists of bronze-smiths and offerings to Poseidon. He wrote to John Chadwick, a Cambridge philologist, and the two co-published the decipherment in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1953.

Ventris died in a road accident in 1956, four years after the broadcast. He was 34.