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The race to decode a mysterious language - Susan Lupack

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    In the early 1900s on the island of Crete,
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    British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans
    uncovered nearly three thousand tablets
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    inscribed with strange symbols.
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    He thought these symbols represented
    the language spoken
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    by Europe’s oldest civilization.
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    Their meaning would elude
    scholars for fifty years.
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    Evans discovered these tablets amid the
    colorful frescoes and maze-like hallways
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    of the palace of Knossos.
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    He called the civilization Minoan—
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    after the mythical
    Cretan ruler, King Minos.
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    He thought the script, dubbed Linear B,
    represented the Minoan language,
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    and scholars all over the world came
    up with their own theories.
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    Was it the lost language of the Etruscans?
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    Or perhaps it represented
    an early form of Basque?
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    The mystery intensified because Evans
    guarded the tablets closely––
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    only two hundred of the inscriptions
    were published during his lifetime––
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    but he couldn’t decipher the script.
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    However, he did make two accurate
    observations:
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    the tablets were administrative records,
    and the script was a syllabary,
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    where each symbol represented
    both a consonant and a vowel,
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    mixed with characters that each
    represented a whole word.
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    Evans worked on Linear B for three decades
    before a scholar from Brooklyn, New York,
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    named Alice Kober set out
    to solve the mystery.
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    Kober was a professor of Classics at
    Brooklyn College
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    when few women held such positions.
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    To help in her quest, she taught herself
    many languages––
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    knowledge she knew she would
    need to decipher Linear B.
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    For the next two decades,
    she analyzed the symbols.
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    Working from the few
    available inscriptions,
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    she recorded how often
    each symbol appeared.
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    Then she recorded how frequently
    each symbol appeared next to another.
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    She stored her findings on scrap
    paper in cigarette cartons
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    because writing supplies were
    scarce during the Second World War.
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    By analyzing these frequencies,
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    she discovered that Linear B relied on
    word endings
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    to give its sentences grammar.
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    From this she began to build a chart
    of the relations between the signs,
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    coming closer than anyone before to
    deciphering Linear B.
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    But she died, probably of cancer,
    in 1950 at the age of forty-three.
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    While Kober was analyzing the Knossos
    tablets,
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    an architect named Michael Ventris was
    also working to crack Linear B.
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    He had become obsessed with Linear B
    as a schoolboy after hearing Evans speak.
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    He even worked on deciphering the
    script while serving in World War II.
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    After the war, Ventris
    built on Kober’s grid
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    using a newly published cache of
    Linear B inscriptions
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    excavated from a different archeological
    site called Pylos, on mainland Greece.
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    His real breakthrough came when he
    compared the tablets from Pylos
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    with those from Knossos
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    and saw that certain words appeared on
    tablets from one site but not the other.
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    He wondered if those words represented
    the names of places
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    specific to each location.
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    He knew that over centuries, place names
    tend to remain constant,
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    and decided to compare Linear B
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    to an ancient syllabary from
    the island of Cyprus.
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    The Cypriot script was used hundreds
    of years after Linear B,
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    but some of the symbols were similar––
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    he wondered if the sounds
    would be similar, too.
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    When Ventris plugged some of the sounds of
    the Cypriot syllabary
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    into the Linear B inscriptions,
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    he came up with the word Knossos,
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    the name of the city where Evans had
    discovered his tablets.
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    In a domino effect, Ventris unraveled
    Linear B,
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    with each word revealing more clearly that
    the language of Linear B was not Minoan,
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    but Greek.
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    Ventris died in a car crash four years
    later, at the age of thirty-four.
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    But his discovery rewrote
    a chapter of history.
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    Evans had insisted that the Minoans
    conquered the mainland Greeks,
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    and that was why examples of Linear B were
    found on the mainland.
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    But the discovery that Linear B
    represented Greek, and not Minoan,
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    showed that the opposite had happened:
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    mainland Greeks invaded Crete and adopted
    the Minoan script for their own language.
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    But the story isn’t over yet.
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    The actual language of the Minoans,
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    represented by another script
    called Linear A,
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    has yet to be deciphered. It remains
    a mystery––at least for now.
Title:
The race to decode a mysterious language - Susan Lupack
Speaker:
Susan Lupack
Description:

more » « less
Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TED-Ed
Duration:
04:24

English subtitles

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