The Man Who Deciphered Linear B Read online

  About the Author

  Andrew Robinson is a King’s Scholar of Eton College, where he won the headmaster’s Greek grammar prize, and holds a degree from Oxford University; he was also a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

  His many books include The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms and Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts, and biographies of Thomas Young (The Last Man Who Knew Everything) and Jean-François Champollion (Cracking the Egyptian Code).

  Other titles by Andrew Robinson published by Thames & Hudson include:

  The Scientists: An Epic of Discovery

  Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture

  The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms

  Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion

  Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts

  Other titles of interest published by Thames & Hudson include:

  Minoan and Mycenaean Art

  Breaking the Maya Code

  See our websites

  http://www.thamesandhudson.com

  http://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1 An Unconventional Upbringing

  2 The War Years

  3 Embryo Architect

  4 Architect and Decipherer

  5 Into the Minoan Labyrinth

  6 Breakthrough

  7 Documents in Mycenaean Greek

  8 Triumph and Tragedy

  Postscript

  Further Reading

  Index

  Copyright

  To the memory of Antony Coulthard (1918–45), a gifted linguist and the Uncle I never knew

  Acknowledgments

  I first became interested in Michael Ventris in 1989, while researching a television programme about his decipherment of Linear B. Although the programme was not made, I found myself writing a few pages about the decipherment in my 1995 book, The Story of Writing, and becoming curious about the somewhat shadowy personality behind the achievement. I also became friendly with his collaborator John Chadwick, author of The Decipherment of Linear B, who helped me considerably until his death in 1998.

  While writing this small book, which is obviously not a full biography, it has been pleasant to discover that Ventris’s generosity and cooperative spirit live on nearly half a century after his death. I have enjoyed invaluable help from his surviving friends and from younger admirers of all that he achieved in his short life, in both decipherment and architecture.

  In the world of classical studies, I am indebted to Alicia Totolos, former secretary of the Institute of Classical Studies in London, who went to great trouble to make available Ventris’s letters and papers, including the press coverage of the decipherment; to John Killen, emeritus professor of Mycenaean Greek at Cambridge University, a close associate of John Chadwick, who put Chadwick’s papers on the decipherment at my disposal; and to Tom Palaima, professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin, who sent me copies of Ventris’s letters to Emmett Bennett Jr and Alice Kober from his PASP archives. All three also shared with me their personal knowledge of the subject.

  In the world of architecture, Oliver Cox, a close friend of Ventris as a student at the Architectural Association school, was constantly encouraging and put me in touch with architects and others who knew Ventris. These include Colin Boyne, Dargan Bullivant, Michael Grice, David Medd and Edward Samuel, to all of whom I am grateful, especially Colin Boyne, former editor of the Architects’ Journal, and Dargan Bullivant, both of whom provided essential background for understanding Ventris’s final architectural project.

  Among the Ventris family, I am grateful to his grandson Björn Ventris (son of the late Nikki Ventris) and Björn’s mother Renee Ventris, who showed me papers and photographs and discussed Ventris’sfamilylife; to his daughter Tessa Ventris, who kindly granted permission to quote from Ventris’s letters and writings; and to Carol Horton, half-sister of Lois Ventris.

  Grateful thanks are also due to Dr John Bennet (of Oxford University) and Tony Meredith (of Stowe School) for essential help, and to Prof. Emmett Bennett Jr, Prof. Sir John Boardman, Jean Cox, Prof. Eric Handley, Rachel and Sinclair Hood, the late Patrick Hunter, Prof. Maurice Pope, Dr Tessa Rajak, John Renton, Robin Richards, Dr Sue Sherratt, Dr John Simopoulos and the late Prudence Smith.

  Finally, I thank the staff of Thames & Hudson for the care and intelligence they have shown in producing the book. Jamie Camplin, my longstanding editor, deserves a personal mention, even though he has a Ventris-like reticence about being acknowledged. He is certainly among the best there is.

  London, August 2001

  Introduction

  ‘There is a land called Crete, set in the wine-dark sea, lovely and fertile and ocean-rounded. Those who live in this land are many, indeed past counting, and there are ninety cities there. The population speaks many tongues; there are Achaeans, there are the brave True Cretans, the Cydonians, the triply divided Dorians and the noble Pelasgians. Among the cities is mighty Knossos; its king was once Minos, who every ninth year took counsel with Zeus himself.’

  Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, Book XIX

  A mere two hundred years ago, the world’s oldest known languages were Greek, Latin and Hebrew. History, in the sense of readable written records, began no earlier than about 600 B.C. Although the antiquity of inscriptions in Egypt and the Near East was suspected, nothing definite could be said about it, beyond what was written in those parts of the Old Testament that seemed historical, and in the confusing accounts of ancient historians and geographers such as Herodotus and Strabo. The age of civilization in India, China and the Americas was terra incognita.

  But then, around 1805, a French schoolboy, Jean-François Champollion, seeing some of the treasures just brought back from Egypt by Napoleon’s savants, became determined to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Twenty years later, with the help of the Rosetta stone, Champollion succeeded and was able to read the script of the pharaohs; as a direct result, the historical time span was doubled, extending back to about 3000 B.C. Later in the 19th century, the cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia were also deciphered; and scholars were able to understand a range of Near Eastern tongues and read the records and literature of ancient Sumer, Babylon and Assyria, comparable in age with those of Egypt.

  Europe, however, still seemed to possess no civilization older than the glories of classical Greece – unless one included the tantalizing stories of the Trojan war composed by Homer at an uncertain date and orally transmitted to later writers. Heinrich Schliemann’s famous excavations at Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s, stimulated by his passion for Homer, put paid to that mistaken impression for ever. Here were golden treasures and a powerful citadel with a Lion Gate worthy of Homer’s King Agamemnon, belonging to a Bronze Age civilization dating to 1400–1200 B.C or earlier: clear evidence, thought some archaeologists (including Schliemann himself, to begin with), that the Mycenaeans were Greeks, ancestors of the founders of western civilization. But the experts in classical Greek art were unconvinced by the new finds which they thought generally barbaric, and the classical philologists were offered no Mycenaean inscriptions to decipher and learn the Mycenaean language from. For no writing had been found at Mycenae by a disappointed Schliemann: not even fragments, certainly no hoped-for record of the Trojan war. It appeared that the Mycenaeans were illiterate, and not Greek speakers, and that there was no continuity between the newly discovered civilization and the classical Greeks who wrote with an alphabet, the ancestor of our modern a
lphabets.

  Then, a century ago, in 1900, Arthur Evans began to dig up and reconstruct the ‘great city’ of Knossos mentioned by Homer, at a site in the northern part of central Crete. He discovered what he believed was the palace of King Minos, with its notorious labyrinth, legendary home of the Minotaur. Over the next three decades, Evans spent his family fortune on reconstructing the palace, including its ‘Room of the Throne’ and its brilliantly painted frescoes, and fell in love with ‘his’ Minoans. Just as they had enthralled Homer and the ancient Greeks, the Minoans in their beautiful island dazzled Evans, too, and convinced him that Greece was ‘a Mainland branch of the Minoan culture’, a mere ‘Minoan plantation’. So much for the greatness of classical Greece and the grandeur and gold of Mycenae and Troy excavated by Schliemann – said Evans in effect: it was the Minoans, and not the Mycenaeans or the Greeks, who had created the first great European civilization; and it was he who had revealed it to a wondering world. If any classical specialist – such as the archaeologists digging in mainland Greece at places such as Mycenae – disagreed with Evans, they seldom voiced their opinion, such was Sir Arthur’s prestige and influence as one of the two or three best-known archaeologists of his time. When the director of the British School at Athens, A. J. B. (Alan) Wace, ventured to differ from Evans in 1923, he had to retire from his position and was excluded from digging in Greece for a considerable period. Minoan hegemony over Greece (and Evans’s hegemony over practically every scholar in the field) became the orthodoxy.

  The locations and dates of Linear B tablet discoveries.

  And Evans, unlike Schliemann, found writing – the earliest writing in Europe. ‘Linear Script of Class B’, which is nowadays dated to c. 1450 B.C., two or three centuries before the Trojan war, was the name given by Evans to the fairly primitive characters scratched on clay tablets that he discovered soon after he began (and which other archaeologists much later on were surprised to discover at places on the mainland, including Mycenae). The ‘Class B’ label was to distinguish the characters from similar-looking but nevertheless distinct characters on archaeologically older tablets (now dated to 1750–1450 B.C.) that Evans had labelled ‘Linear Script of Class A’, which had been found at Knossos but chiefly at another Minoan palace excavation in southern Crete. ‘Linear’ – not because the symbols were written in sequence but because they consisted of lines inscribed on a surface, as opposed to the three-dimensional, engraved images of a third, pictographic Cretan script, found chiefly on seal stones and only in the eastern part of the island, which Evans dubbed ‘Hieroglyphic’ but which actually did not much resemble Egyptian writing.

  To be frank, Linear B tablets are uninspiring objects to the eye of the uninitiated, unlike Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, the Mayan glyphs of Central America and many of the cuneiform tablets. They are flat, smooth pieces of clay, their colour generally dull grey but sometimes like red brick (the result of greater oxidation when the tablet was burnt). Their sizes vary from small sealings and labels little more than an inch across to heavy, page-shaped tablets designed to be held in a single hand, the largest being as big as a fair-sized paperback. Evans found many of them in a fragile, even friable condition and once accidentally reduced a batch to an indecipherable muddy mess by leaving them overnight in a storeroom with a leaky roof.

  Portrait of Arthur Evans by Sir W. B. Richmond, 1907.

  (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)

  A Linear B tablet published by Arthur Evans in American British School in Athens, VII, 1900.

  Indeed, the first traces of Linear B he unearthed were so unimpressive that he copied them and filed them away in what he termed ‘a suspense account’. Yet Evans, whose first love was for epigraphy not archaeology – scripts not potsherds, so to speak – quickly became hooked on the problem of what the undeciphered characters meant. They bore little resemblance to Egyptian hieroglyphs (though Evans detected some), and no resemblance to cuneiform or the later Greek alphabet. As for the underlying language of the mysterious Linear inscriptions, Evans was quite convinced, for reasons already given, that it could not be Greek: he therefore coined the term Minoan for it. Then he spent the last 40 years of his long life hoping to decipher the script and language – while keeping the vast majority of the tablets away from other scholars, lest (as one is almost compelled to assume) they got to the answer before the grand old man of Minoan culture.

  Michael Ventris, the person who eventually ‘cracked’ Linear B and discovered it was actually an archaic dialect of Greek – in 1952–53, a decade after Evans’s death – was not a professional scholar (unlike, say, Champollion); he was an architect by training who never attended a university and treated Linear B as a kind of hobby that gripped him as a schoolboy. A second irony is that Ventris succeeded where professional scholars failed by being as candid in his decipherment methods as they (and this would include Champollion) were habitually secretive: indeed he kept his ‘rivals’ literally posted on what he was doing by mailing them detailed ‘Work Notes’ showing his latest thinking and inviting their criticism and suggestions. Yet a third irony is that Ventris was largely uninterested in classical literature; it was the problem, the puzzle, of deciphering Linear B that fascinated him, not so much what the inscriptions might tell us about ancient Greece (again unlike Champollion, who was passionate about all things ancient Egyptian).

  If there is one word that sums up Ventris, it is ‘unconventional’. Almost everyone who knew him remarked on the ease and charm of his company, but he could be exceptionally withdrawn and uncommunicative; he was a dazzling polyglot who took pride in speaking most major European languages, yet he felt close to hardly anyone, and these few were mainly English speakers; as an architect and decipherer he believed firmly in collaboration and cross-fertilization, yet he kept his many personal relationships in remarkably separate compartments; his tastes in architecture were thoroughly modern and anti-classical, but his interest in Linear B required an intimate knowledge of the classical world; he had a substantial private income, but he was not interested in living the lifestyle of the rich and had socialist tendencies; even physically he looked much more like a tanned, glamorous sportsman (he was an avid skier) than an etiolated scholar, a City gent far more than an absent-minded professor. It would be easy to continue with this list of paradoxes. Above all, Ventris showed a modesty which verged on diffidence – ‘almost alarmingly’ so, according to an architect friend – despite having as much (indeed more) to boast about as a Nobel prize winner.

  Without a shadow of doubt, this freedom from orthodox thinking and attitudes was the key to Ventris’s success as a decipherer of Linear B (though not, it would seem, success in his career as an architect, where he had a long struggle with his excessively logical mind). But it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how the key unlocked the ancient symbols. John Chadwick, the distinguished Cambridge University classicist who was Ventris’s academic collaborator in applying the decipherment to the Linear B tablets in the months and years after Ventris had achieved his pioneering breakthrough, made a stab at explaining the working of the magic in 1983, a quarter of a century after Ventris’s tragic death at the age of only 34. Chadwick wrote: ‘The achievement of the decipherment…required painstaking analysis and sound judgment, but at the same time an element of genius, the ability to take a leap in the dark, but then to find firm ground on the other side. Few discoveries are made solely by processes of logical deduction. At some point the researcher is obliged to chance a guess, to venture an unlikely hypothesis; what matters is whether he can control the leap of the imagination, and have the honesty to evaluate the results soberly. Only after the leap has been made is it possible to go back over the working and discover the logical basis which provided the necessary springboard.’

  This is honest, if daunting; it is no accident that Chadwick once confessed to Ventris that he was the ‘pedestrian’ Dr Watson to the master decipherer’s Holmes. Nevertheless, in writing his justly celebrated book The Decipherment
of Linear B (1958) soon after Ventris had died, Chadwick attempted to turn the decipherment into a more rational process than he knew it actually to have been. Admirably clear though Chadwick’s account is, it deliberately underrates the irrational intuitions that pepper Ventris’s own Work Notes and hardly mentions most of the blind alleys that Ventris followed – notably his sustained conviction, to the very end of the chase, that the ‘Minoan’ language of Linear B could not be Greek but must be related to Etruscan, a barely understood, non-Indo-European language.

  One can well understand why Chadwick did this, given the need to make complex material clear to the general reader, and, as important, the natural academic desire to prefer reasoned explanation over mystification and words like ‘genius’. Less understandable, perhaps, is his book’s omission of the human factor: the way in which Ventris’s unconventional personality strongly influenced his approach to Linear B. But then, as Chadwick himself admitted, he knew ‘only one side of [Ventris’s] character’, and their relationship was ‘largely through letters’. Of Ventris’s extraordinary linguistic gifts in modern European languages, Chadwick at least had some slight first-hand experience, but of his novel, sophisticated, analytical approach to design in architecture – which Ventris applied to the decipherment too – Chadwick knew next to nothing; he therefore left the architect totally out of his book. It was reallynot possible for Chadwick – and no doubt he felt the academic’s typical aversion towards mixing the man with the work – to grasp fully the diverse and unique influences that drove Ventris. While he had personal experience of the fact that Ventris’s ‘brain worked with astonishing rapidity, so that he could think out all the implications of a suggestion almost before it was out of your mouth’, it was altogether another thing to explain this brilliance – if it can be explained.