Education: Tale of Two Palaces

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Notes from a Kitchen. From one tablet bearing pictures of cups, jars and crockery, Ventris got more encouragement. The tablet was obviously an inventory from the kitchens of Pylos, and since some of the pictures showed cups or bowls with up to four handles, Ventris began applying appropriate Greek numbers to the accompanying texts. Thus he found that all the three-handled cups were described by the word beginning tri, and the four-handled vessels began with que-t-ro, a likely early form of the Greek four. Furthermore, when there were two cups in question, their names had endings "which are exactly what those Greek words require in the dual form."

Building on such clues, Ventris and other scholars have been able to translate enough to get an enlarged picture of life at Pylos. Though Homer mentions few craftsmen, and has thus given rise to the notion that the Achaeans were a primitive society with only elementary skills, Ventris and the archaeologists found an abundant record of priests, bakers, tailors, goldsmiths, seamstresses, bath attendants.

But of all the inscriptions he examined, one struck Ventris in particular. It came, not from Pylos, but from Knossos, yet it clearly bears the names of four Greek gods and goddesses—"the Mistress Athena," "the God of War (Ares)," "the Healer (Apollo)," and "Poseidon." Last week Ventris felt he had enough evidence to hazard two corrections to ancient history. For one thing, says he, the Achaeans were a literate race 700 years before the time of Homer, and secondly, it was they, not the Minoans, who did the traveling. Indeed, says Ventris, the Achaeans must have gone to Crete long before 1400 B.C., probably ruling there as conquerors, living in the palace of Knossos, turning out their tablets—"this first record of a language which, after participating in many adventures of the human mind, is still spoken today by eight million people."