b. Number 14, pa-ka-na, is equivalent to ‘phasgana’ (swords). (Ventris originally gave a somewhat different equivalent word.) There is no aspirated ‘p’, ph, so the classical Greek phi, φ, is represented simply by the inherent consonant ‘p’, e.g. the classical Greek syllable ‘pha-’ is written with the sign for pa; the script does not distinguish between k and g; and ‘s’ is omitted when before another consonant (in this case ‘g’).
c. Number 17, te-re-ta, is equivalent to ‘telestās’ (official). The script does not distinguish r and l (like Japanese, which is why Japanese speakers tend to pronounce ‘r’ and ‘l’ the same when speaking English – hence the familiar joke about ‘flied lice’); and again ‘s’ is omitted when before another consonant (in this case ‘t’) and also when final (compare A-mi-ni-so = Amnisos).
d. Number 23, te-ko-to-ne, is equivalent to ‘tektones’ (carpenters). The stop consonant ‘k’, when it precedes another consonant (in this case ‘t’), is generally written with the vowel of the following syllable (in this case ‘o’); and again, final ‘-s’ is omitted.
e. Number 30, to-so, is equivalent to ‘tossos’ (so much). This is the ‘total’ word on the tablets (see pages 24–25). Double consonants are not distinguished; and yet again, ‘s’ is omitted when final.
These examples suggest a rather loose way of spelling in Mycenaean Greek, and there are quite a number of other spelling rules that have not yet been mentioned. For instance, the script does not distinguish p and b (in addition to ph) – thus the two signs which were read pa-te in number 7 above could also theoretically be read pha-te and ba-te. A second rule concerns diphthongs, where the second component is in some cases indicated (as in ai, eu, ou) and in other cases generally omitted (as in a(i), e(i), o(i), u(i)), except before another vowel (e.g. classical Greek ‘-aios’) and in the initial sign ai. A third rule is the glide that intervenes in pronunciation between an i and a following vowel, which is generally indicated in Mycenaean by ‘j’ – hence Kober’s ‘triplet’ (page 69) A-mi-ni-so (Amnisos)/A-mi-ni-si-jo (Amnisian men)/A-mi-ni-si-ja (Amnisian women) – which in classical Greek would be written without the ‘j’ and pronounced with a glide: Amnisos/Amnisioi/Amnisiai.
This quick tour of the spelling rules is intended mainly to show what Ventris was up against, without confusing the reader with too much tricky detail. It is not necessary to understand the Mycenaean spelling rules to grasp Ventris’s achievement, but we need to realize that the looseness of the rules made the decipherment an easy target for unsympathetic critics, especially in its early stages when the rules had not been fully formulated. Yet as Ventris and Chadwick pointed out in their first joint writing, ‘If the language is Greek, we are seeing it at a stage 1000 years older than Plato (a difference in date as great as between Beowulf and Shakespeare), and separated from the classical idiom by a Dark Age. It is set in a different environment, and surrounded, possibly closely intermingled, with barbarian languages spoken by peoples of equal or superior culture. Some elements of the vocabulary may be either “Aegean”, or distorted by non-Greek scribes, or part of an older stratum of Greek unfamilar to classical philology.’
It is at this point, in mid-July 1952, that John Chadwick enters the Linear B story as a contributor to the decipherment. From his specialized knowledge of archaic Greek dialects, his wider interest in languages and his experience of wartime code-breaking, he would now help Ventris sort out, with admirable clarity, what was and what was not reasonable in interpreting the Mycenaean word formations tumbling out of the tablets.
Chadwick had recently been appointed as a junior lecturer in classical philology at Cambridge University, but he had yet to move to Cambridge and was still living in Oxford where he worked on the Oxford Latin Dictionary. (Before that, he had studied classics at Cambridge and served during the war at Bletchley Park, specializing in the translation of decrypted Japanese naval messages sent to Tokyo from Berlin.) For some time, he had been toying with Linear B, without making any progress, and without any knowledge of Ventris and his Work Notes, to his later chagrin. So when he heard the BBC broadcast on 1 July, he immediately contacted Myres, copied down the proposed phonetic values from the latest grid and began to apply them to the published tablets. Within a few days, despite the old man’s scepticism and his own instinctive cautiousness, Chadwick was an enthusiastic and confident convert. He was the first scholar to be won over by the decipherment, because he had the philological training to make sense of the results,which was not true of Bennett or Myres. On 9 July, he told the latter bluntly: ‘I think we must accept the fact that a new chapter in Greek history, philology and epigraphy is about to be written.’
A slightly grudging Myres gave Ventris Chadwick’s address and vice versa, and during July, a correspondence rapidly got going between them. A few excerpts are worth quoting for their flavour of what Chadwick would later call ‘very fruitful cooperation’ – ‘group working’ under another name – reminiscent of his own analogy with Holmes and Watson, mentioned in the Introduction.
Ventris wrote first, on 9 July, enclosing some notes, ‘as I gather you have been working for some time on the same problem.… If you find any points of contact between your work and mine it would be very interesting to have the opportunity of exchanging views.’
Chadwick, replying on 13 July, opened by offering his congratulations on ‘having solved the Minoan problem; it is a magnificent achievement and you are yet only at the beginning of your triumph.’ He concluded: ‘If there is anything a mere philologist can do, please let me know. I shall go ahead trying to unravel the tablets on the basis of your solution, and will let you know if I find anything helpful.’
Ventris responded by return at length: ‘Frankly at the moment I feel rather in need of moral support. The whole issue is getting to the stage where a lot of people will be looking at it very sceptically, and I am conscious there’s a lot which so far can’t be very satisfactorily explained. There’s a kind of central area of sense, but still a great periphery which is baffling…I’ve been feeling the need of a “mere philologist” to keep me on the right lines.… It would be extremely useful to me if I could count on your help, not only in trying to make sense of the material, but also in drawing the conclusions about the [word] formations in terms of dialect and stage of development. I sounded JHS [the Journal of Hellenic Studies], who had asked me to review Scripta Minoa, if they would have room for an article on “Mycenaean Greek” in next year’s number, for which the MS would be in by the end of November.… If they do, and if the vocabulary can be solidified some more by then, then would you be willing to collaborate in this article?’ In a PS, Ventris added that he was worried by the absence of the definite article (present in classical Greek) in Mycenaean Greek.
Chadwick wrote back on 17 July: ‘I am not surprised you are meeting with some resistance; the idea is too staggering to swallow at once.… [But] being a philologist I am not in the least worried by inexplicable words, as there are plenty in much later inscriptions, or by curious spellings and survivals. A further point is that I am familiar with Japanese, which uses to supplement the Chinese ideograms [logograms] a syllabary very similar in form to the Cypriot, and of courselackingsignsfor L: e.g. Apollo appears as a-po-ro.… The definite article ought not to be present, as it is not yet fully developed in Homer… I should have been much more worried if you had found an article.’ He welcomed the chance to collaborate.
On 21 July, Ventris told Chadwick: ‘I see that you will be a very valuable ally’. He enclosed a set of Work Notes with a frank appraisal of their successes and failures. Replying on 25 July, Chadwick worried about infringing Ventris’s copyright, so to speak, by showing his grid to other scholars. But Ventris unsurprisingly encouraged him on 28 July: ‘I don’t feel very strong copyright in the suggested solution, because every other day I get so doubtful about the whole thing that I’d almost rather it was someone else’s. In fact, I’d like as many people as possible to be thinking about the problem
on these lines, as there are so many loose ends still dangling: and if I come to write up some of the approach in an article, it will be useful to have had as much informed comment as possible beforehand.’
His diffidence was not false modesty; he really felt it. His letters to Myres and Bennett at this time are riddled with the same doubt. No wonder he was tickled to read a news report about Charlie Chaplin’s controversial return to London from America, which he passed on without comment to Myres. Asked by a reporter about his next film, Chaplin said: ‘I intend to make a picture about New York. It will be about a Displaced Person arriving in the New World. He will be suffering from a head wound which has given him the complaint called cryptosthenia, whereby he speaks in an ancient language. No one can understand him at the immigration barriers, and so he is allowed to pass all the language tests.’ Then Chaplin mimed a scene as he imagined it at the questioning point and said: ‘Effelequesta’ – ‘They think that’s Greek.’
Ventris was sharply conscious that he himself was some sort of alien arriving in the world of academe speaking a possibly imaginary language that purported to be Greek. With this feeling at the forefront of his mind, over the summer of 1952 he wrote the first draft of what would become one of the most important (and best-selling) papers ever published by the venerable Journal of Hellenic Studies, cautiously entitled ‘Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean archives’.
In late September, he sent it to Chadwick with the comment: ‘the first duty seems to be to supply the reasoning behind the interpretation, and the kind of popularization which tries to draw historical conclusions from the material can only come after.’ In other words, the justification of the decipherment must be the main purpose of the article,not a discussion of what the tablets might tell the world about more glamorous subjects such as King Minos, Homer and the Trojan war. The draft also went to Bennett and Myres (its complex signs neatly copied on to carbons by Ventris – no photocopying in 1952!). ‘The introduction has been one of the hardest parts to write, both in giving a fair view of the historical background, and in striking a balance between over-optimism and over-timidity in presenting what we feel is a very considerable body of pro-Greek evidence’, Ventris told Myres. ‘If anything, it will be Chadwick who will be for stating the proposition in more unequivocal terms.’
This last was true, but Chadwick also turned out to be a stern critic of ‘over-optimism’ that might appear to be linguistic legerdemain. Bearing in mind that most JHS readers were knowledgeable only about classical Greek, not the Greek of the earlier dialects, he told Ventris: ‘Half of the article will consist of incomprehensible references and the other half of unwarranted assumptions.’ Soon afterwards, in mid-October, the two men met in Cambridge for the first time to discuss the problem – a meeting followed by a Swissair postcard from Ventris, postmarked Gstaad and purely about Linear B; personal matters would seldom intrude in their correspondence. A second draft by Ventris in early November fared little better with Chadwick: ‘I think a lot of your suggestions are brilliant, and many may well prove right. But I think you are trying to go too far at once; if I may repeat what I said before, one should be cautious but not timid. In particular I feel that one should be very careful to show that proper linguistic laws are in operation, and be wary of varying the rules to suit peculiar cases.’
The impact of all this criticism was to reduce the section on the decipherment itself to less than two pages out of twenty, and instead to focus on giving large amounts of Mycenaean vocabulary, which ordinary classicists would grasp more easily than Ventris’s ‘brilliance’. Having examined these Ventris/Chadwick transliterations/translations of certain sign groups in the tablets, other scholars could then substitutethe phonetic values from the grid into Linear B sign groups of their own choosing, and make their own convincing discoveries. Although Chadwick was probably right in his tactical advice to Ventris, it did have the effect (as Chadwick later admitted) of depriving us of a fuller account of the decipherment at the time when this was freshest in Ventris’s mind. In the end, Ventris never wrote such an account.
Of the hundreds of results presented in this article, two were particularly striking. The first was an exceptionally long name containing eight signs, which could be transliterated with the sign list as E-te-wo-ke-re-we-i-jo – an exact fit (according to the spelling rules) with a patronymic derived from the classical Greek name Eteocles in what we know was its ancestral form. Since there are 200,000 million possible permutations of eight syllables, coincidence was ruled out here. The second result was a tablet from Knossos that Ventris later described as ‘the most startling document…for a generation brought up to regard Knossos as the preserve of Evans’s Great Mother Goddess’. It contained four names recognizable as ancient Greek divine names: A-ta-na (Athena), E-nu-wa-ri-jo (Enyalios – Ares), Pa-ja-wo (Homeric Paiēōn – Paian or Apollo) and Po-se-da[-o] (Poseidon). (The square bracket indicates that the tablet is broken here.) ‘I’ve a rooted objection to finding gods’ names on the tablets’, Ventris told Chadwick, because cranky decipherers so often resorted to religion to explain undeciphered scripts (and besides, Ventris was atheistically inclined). The transliteration looked ‘too good to be true’. Agreed about ‘the danger of finding divine names’, replied Chadwick, ‘but if we have them I would much rather have four on one tablet than find them scattered about in unverifiable contexts.’ They eventually accepted that the four Greek gods’ names were genuine, and the tablet probably recorded the dedication of one item of something unknown to each of the four gods (the numeral 1 appeared on the tablet, apparently next to each name).
In late November, the joint article was at last despatched to the journal for typesetting (though it would not appear in print until the late summer of 1953). Ventris thanked Chadwick for making an ‘enormous difference to its value and cogency’. Neither Myres nor Bennett had contributed, despite being invited to do so. ‘It obviously is a bit hard for an old man to be told that Greek has been sitting under his nose for 40–50 years without his suspecting it’, Ventris remarked to Chadwick. To Bennett he wrote: ‘As far as we are concerned the line of attack is common knowledge among our band of sleuths now, and there’s no reason why the discussion shouldn’t be general and battle be joined as from now.’
At this point, near the end of 1952, nothing about the decipherment had appeared in public except the BBC talk, but Ventris was receiving requests for articles, talks and interviews, as was Chadwick. The Times asked Ventris to write a piece, but he declined because he did not want to rehash the BBC talk or anticipate the Journal of Hellenic Studies article, or ‘drag you Siamese-twin fashion into publicity which may be badly timed’, he told Chadwick. Instead, he said, he had given The Times two pages of background and suggested that their New York correspondent try to contact Bennett for an opinion. ‘I wish him luck.’
Bennett offered the following comment: ‘I think there is not yet enough material available to make a deciphering of these tablets certain one way or the other. Michael Ventris’s theory that the language of the Minoan tablets is a very early Greek is a tempting possibility. That is all I would say at this stage.’ To Ventris himself, he wrote ironically, referring to his ‘fine set of cautious, non-committal phrases’. But the truth was – as Bennett knew by now even though he was not ready to say so publicly – that Ventris’s decipherment was correct, and he, Bennett, had missed the Linear B decipherment boat. Both he and Chadwick were equally cautious and excellent scholars, but Chadwick had the major advantage over Bennett of a sound linguistic training in early Greek. Bennett’s disappointment at not having perceived the Greek solution before 1952 was however softened by the transparent originality, brilliance and modesty of Ventris himself; it would have been galling indeed for Bennett if Chadwick, or one of the other European scholars, had beaten him to the solution. He and Ventris would always remain on congenial terms: as personalities, they were actually more simpatico than Ventris and Chadwick – for one thing they shared a sen
se of humour, which was not Chadwick’s strongest suit.
In Sweden, by contrast, a senior scholar at the University of Uppsala, Arne Furumark, had gone overboard for the decipherment in a major press announcement in November – the first on the Continent. An embarrassed Ventris tried to correct certain enthusiastic misstatements in interviews with the Swedish newspapers, and then passed on the cuttings to Chadwick and Bennett ‘in their awful entirety’ with his own translations for their benefit. ‘How do you come to be so expert in Swedish?’ replied Chadwick. ‘But I have long ceased being surprised at the extent of your knowledge. It’s a great pity you did not choose an academic career; but there are many things to be said against such a life.’
Rather than writing for newspapers, both men preferred to concentrate on persuading academics through private correspondence and talks at universities. In December, Chadwick lectured at Oxford. (‘I looked in to see Sir John Myres.… He thinks you ought to abandon architecture and devote yourself wholly to Mycenaean!’) In early May, Ventris spoke at Cambridge, where he met Chadwick for the second time, and afterwards received some advice from him about a forthcoming talk at Oxford: ‘if I might make a suggestion I feel it would be appropriate…to be a little more definite in asserting the language to be Greek. A proper intellectual humility is a good thing, but (especially at Oxford) it may be mistaken for diffidence.’ Ventris would never be very comfortable in the company of professional classicists.
However, big news that would push the decipherment into the headlines, whether Ventris wanted it there or not, was about to break. During 1952, the American archaeologist Carl Blegen (who had received Ventris’s Work Notes) had resumed his pre-war excavations in the ‘Palace of Nestor’ at Pylos, and the British archaeologist Alan Wace had excavated further at Mycenae. Both men had found fresh Linear B tablets: some 400 at Pylos, and about 40 at Mycenae. In March, Ventris had dinner with Blegen in London to encourage him to reveal what he had found. He reported to Chadwick: ‘on the decipherment problem in general, [Blegen] feels the tablets ought to be in Greek, but proposes to be “neutral” until the decipherers get the answer finally sorted out.’
The Man Who Deciphered Linear B Page 10