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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.