Tale of Two Palaces

Ever since 1900, when Archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans first discovered the hundreds of clay tablets in the ruins of King Minos' great palace at Knossos, Crete, scholars have been puzzling over a mystery. Some of the tablets bear a type of script that Evans named Linear A. Others bear symbols that indicate another language, which Evans called Linear B. What sort of language is it, and what do the tablets say? For half a century, scholars have been guessing.

Last week in the U.S. quarterly Archaeology, a plausible solution came from an amateur: a young (31) London architect named Michael Ventris. It so happened that as a schoolboy of thirteen, Ventris heard a lecture by Sir Arthur Evans, has been fascinated by the Minoan mystery ever since. If his present solution is correct, scholars will not only have to rewrite the history of Crete, they will also have to change their ideas about the civilization of the pre-Homeric Greeks.

Minoans on the Mainland? Using his knowledge of ancient languages (Greek and Latin), plus some of the methods he learned as a wartime cryptographer, Ventris began his work in earnest after the publication in 1951 of a book concerning another great discovery. The book was about the work of Professor Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati, who had come across 600 tablets while excavating the site of what is believed to have been the palace of King Nestor of Pylos, one of the great, Greek-speaking Achaean heroes of the Iliad. Since the Evans and Blegen tablets were in the same Linear B script, it was obvious that Knossos on the island of Crete and Pylos on the mainland of Greece had some close connection. But scholars have long assumed that the Achaeans were illiterate, for Homer gives little real indication that his heroes could write. The tablets, concluded the scholars, were therefore probably in the unknown language of the Minoans—the work of a group of conquerors or colonists from the superior civilization of Crete.

At first Ventris also favored the idea that the tablets were Minoan. That being the case, he had few hints as to their meaning, except for the tiny pictures (e.g., a horse's head, a chariot, a cup) that accompanied some of the text. Otherwise, the writing seemed to consist of about 88 "signs," each one apparently denoting a syllable. With the help of Cambridge Philologist John Chadwick, Ventris began experimenting. He counted the frequencies of various signs, tried to determine how often they might appear at the beginning, the middle, or the end of words. Then he began to investigate the various changes in word endings, found that they seemed to follow certain rules of grammar much like those of Greek. Finally, he began coupling various Greek syllable sounds with likely signs on the tablets. To one word, for instance, he assigned the Greek sounds KO-NO-SO (Knossos), and to another word with the same beginning, he assigned KO-WO, or kor-wos, classical Greek for boy. Taking his cue from the tablets' pictures, Ventris tried other combinations. To his delight, the tablets at last began to make sense.