Editing Michael Ventris (section)

==Decipherment==
At the beginning of the 20th century, [[archaeology|archaeologist]] [[Arthur Evans]] began excavating an ancient site at [[Knossos]], on the island of [[Crete]]. In doing so he uncovered a great many clay tablets inscribed with two unknown scripts, [[Linear A]] and [[Linear B]]. Evans attempted to decipher both in the following decades, with little success.

In 1936, Evans hosted an exhibition on Cretan archaeology at [[Burlington House]] in London, home of the [[Royal Academy]]. It was the jubilee anniversary (50 years) of the [[British School at Athens|British School of Archaeology in Athens]], owners and managers of the Knossos site. Evans had given them the site with his Villa Ariadne house some years previously. Boys from Stowe School were in attendance at one lecture and tour conducted by the 85-year-old Evans himself. Ventris, aged 14 at the time, was present and remembered Evans walking with a stick, probably the cane named Prodger which Evans carried all his life to assist him with his short-sightedness and night blindness. Evans held up tablets of the unknown scripts for the audience to see. During the interview period following the lecture, Ventris spoke up to confirm that Linear B was as yet undeciphered, and he determined to decipher it.

In 1940, the 18-year-old Ventris had an article "Introducing the Minoan Language" published in the ''[[American Journal of Archaeology]]''.<ref>{{harvnb|Robinson|2002|pp=32–3}}</ref> Ventris's initial theory was that [[Etruscan language|Etruscan]] and Linear B were related and that this might provide a key to decipherment. Although this proved incorrect, it was a link he continued to explore until the early 1950s.

Shortly after Evans died, [[Alice Kober]] noted that certain words in Linear B inscriptions had changing word endings – perhaps [[declensions]] in the manner of [[Latin]] or Greek. Using this basis, Ventris constructed a series of [[Grid (page layout)|grids]] associating the symbols on the tablets with [[consonant]]s and [[vowel]]s. While ''which'' consonants and vowels these were remained mysterious, Ventris learned enough about the structure of the underlying language to begin experimenting.

Shortly before World War II, American archaeologist [[Carl Blegen]] discovered a further 600 or so tablets of Linear B in the Mycenaean palace of [[Pylos]] on the Greek mainland. Photographs of these tablets by archaeologist [[Alison Frantz]] facilitated Ventris's later decipherment of the Linear B script.<ref name="McCredie">{{cite journal |last=McCredie |first=James R. |date=June 2000 |title=Biographical Memoirs: Alison Frantz |url=http://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/Frantz.pdf |url-status=dead |journal=Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society |volume=144 |issue=2 |pages=213–217 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131102094950/http://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/Frantz.pdf |archive-date=2 November 2013 |access-date=15 October 2013}}</ref>

In 1948 [[John Myres|Sir John Myres]] invited a group of academics to help him transcribe Linear B material. Amongst them were Dr. Kober and Ventris. Although they did not collaborate further, Kober's work was essential in providing the foundational understanding from which Ventris built his theories on Linear B.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Chadwick |first=John |title=The Decipherment of Linear B (2nd ed.). |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1967}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last=Fox |first=Margalit |date=2013-05-11 |title=Alice E. Kober, 43; Lost to History No More |language=en-US |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/sunday-review/alice-e-kober-43-lost-to-history-no-more.html |access-date=2022-09-24 |issn=0362-4331}}</ref>

Comparing the Linear B tablets discovered on the Greek mainland, and noting that certain symbol groups appeared only in the Cretan texts, Ventris made the inspired guess that those were place names on the island. This proved to be correct. Armed with the symbols he could decipher from this, Ventris soon unlocked much of the text and determined that the underlying language of Linear B, a [[Syllabary|syllabic script]], was in fact Greek. On 1 July 1952, Ventris announced his preliminary findings on a BBC radio talk which was heard by [[John Chadwick]], a classicist at the University of Cambridge who had been involved in code breaking at [[Bletchley Park]] during the Second World War. The two men began to collaborate on further research into deciphering Linear B. In 1953 further Linear B tablets were discovered at ancient Mycenae and ancient Pylos on the Greek mainland, with one of the tablets ([[PY Ta 641]]) showing a pictographic tripod cauldron next to Linear B symbols which were translated by Ventris and Chadwick as "ti-ri-po-de", tripod being a Greek word. This led to wider international collaboration with other classical scholars and between 1953 and 1956 Ventris and Chadwick published joint papers.<ref>{{Cite ODNB |title=Ventris, Michael George Francis (1922–1956), classical scholar and architect |url=https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36640 |access-date=2022-09-24 |year=2004 |language=en |doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/36640|isbn=978-0-19-861412-8 |last1=Robinson |first1=Andrew }}</ref> This overturned Evans's theories of Minoan history by establishing that Cretan civilization, at least in the later periods associated with the Linear B tablets, had been part of [[Mycenaean Greece|Mycenean Greece]].