The race to decode a mysterious language - Susan Lupack

In the early 1900s on the island of Crete,

British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans
uncovered nearly three thousand tablets

inscribed with strange symbols.

He thought these symbols represented
the language spoken

by Europe’s oldest civilization.

Their meaning would elude
scholars for fifty years.

Evans discovered these tablets amid the
colorful frescoes and maze-like hallways

of the palace of Knossos.

He called the civilization Minoan—

after the mythical
Cretan ruler, King Minos.

He thought the script, dubbed Linear B,
represented the Minoan language,

and scholars all over the world came
up with their own theories.

Was it the lost language of the Etruscans?

Or perhaps it represented
an early form of Basque?

The mystery intensified because Evans
guarded the tablets closely––

only two hundred of the inscriptions
were published during his lifetime––

but he couldn’t decipher the script.

However, he did make two accurate
observations:

the tablets were administrative records,
and the script was a syllabary,

where each symbol represented
both a consonant and a vowel,

mixed with characters that each
represented a whole word.

Evans worked on Linear B for three decades
before a scholar from Brooklyn, New York,

named Alice Kober set out
to solve the mystery.

Kober was a professor of Classics at
Brooklyn College

when few women held such positions.

To help in her quest, she taught herself
many languages––

knowledge she knew she would
need to decipher Linear B.

For the next two decades,
she analyzed the symbols.

Working from the few
available inscriptions,

she recorded how often
each symbol appeared.

Then she recorded how frequently
each symbol appeared next to another.

She stored her findings on scrap
paper in cigarette cartons

because writing supplies were
scarce during the Second World War.

By analyzing these frequencies,

she discovered that Linear B relied on
word endings

to give its sentences grammar.

From this she began to build a chart
of the relations between the signs,

coming closer than anyone before to
deciphering Linear B.

But she died, probably of cancer,
in 1950 at the age of forty-three.

While Kober was analyzing the Knossos
tablets,

an architect named Michael Ventris was
also working to crack Linear B.

He had become obsessed with Linear B
as a schoolboy after hearing Evans speak.

He even worked on deciphering the
script while serving in World War II.

After the war, Ventris
built on Kober’s grid

using a newly published cache of
Linear B inscriptions

excavated from a different archeological
site called Pylos, on mainland Greece.

His real breakthrough came when he
compared the tablets from Pylos

with those from Knossos

and saw that certain words appeared on
tablets from one site but not the other.

He wondered if those words represented
the names of places

specific to each location.

He knew that over centuries, place names
tend to remain constant,

and decided to compare Linear B to
an ancient syllabary from the island of Cyprus.

The Cypriot script was used hundreds
of years after Linear B,

but some of the symbols were similar––

he wondered if the sounds
would be similar, too.

When Ventris plugged some of the sounds of
the Cypriot syllabary

into the Linear B inscriptions,

he came up with the word Knossos,

the name of the city where Evans had
discovered his tablets.

In a domino effect, Ventris unraveled
Linear B,

with each word revealing more clearly that
the language of Linear B was not Minoan,

but Greek.

Ventris died in a car crash four years
later, at the age of thirty-four.

But his discovery rewrote
a chapter of history.

Evans had insisted that the Minoans
conquered the mainland Greeks,

and that was why examples of Linear B were
found on the mainland.

But the discovery that Linear B
represented Greek, and not Minoan,

showed that the opposite had happened:

mainland Greeks invaded Crete and adopted
the Minoan script for their own language.

But the story isn’t over yet.

The actual language of the Minoans,

represented by another script
called Linear A,

has yet to be deciphered. It remains
a mystery––at least for now.