Education: 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...