Two months later, in mid-May, he received a letter from Blegen in Athens. Immediately, instead of writing a letter as usual, Ventris phoned Chadwick at his flat in Cambridge, his voice brimming with excitement – ‘he rarely showed signs of emotion, but for him this was a dramatic moment,’ Chadwick recalled in The Decipherment of Linear B. Blegen had written: ‘Since my return to Greece I have spent much of my time working on the tablets from Pylos, getting them ready to be photographed. I have tried your experimental syllabary on some of them.… Enclosed for your information is a copy of P641, which you may find interesting. It evidently deals with pots, some of three legs, some with four handles, some with three, and others without handles. The first word by your system seems to be ti-ri-po-de and it recurs twice as ti-ri-po (singular?). The four-handled pot is preceded by qe-to-ro-we, the three-handled by ti-ri-wo-we or ti-ri-jo-we, the handleless pot by a-no-we. All this seems too good to be true. Is coincidence excluded? The other words are not so easy to explain.’
Opposite is a photograph of tablet P641, with drawings by Ventris and transliterations into Mycenaean and translations into English by Ventris and Chadwick.
Even to the untrained eye, the match between the three-legged pictogram and its accompanying word ti-ri-po (compare ‘tripos’, tripod cauldron, in classical Greek), is impressive. With some knowledge of Greek, the four-handled, three-handled and no-handled goblet pictograms accompanying qe-to-ro-we, ti-ri-jo-we and a-no-we are easily matched with ‘tetra-’ (four in classical Greek, but compare ‘quattuor’ in Latin), ‘tri-’ (three in classical Greek), and ‘an-’ (the negative prefix) – combined with -o-we (‘-oues’, ears/handles, in classical Greek). The words me-zo and me-wi-jo meaning ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ respectively were already known from their use in classifying children into ‘seniors’ and ‘juniors’. Another word, di-pa, had to be the vessel called ‘depas’ mentioned in Homer.
Tablet P641 with Ventris’s own drawings, and transliterations by Ventris and Chadwick.
(Tripods tablet, Pylos, 13th century B.C. Linear B signs drawn by MV, first published in ‘King Nestor’s four-handled cups’, Archaeology, 1954.)
The basic Linear B syllabary.
Was it too far-fetched to associate this four-handled goblet in King Nestor’s palace archives with the cup described by Homer in the Iliad, before Nestor sets off for the Trojan war? It was ‘a magnificent cup adorned with golden studs.… It had four handles.… Anyone else would have found it difficult to shift the cup from the table when full, but Nestor, old as he was, could lift it without trouble.’ At any rate, when Ventris published his above drawing of the tablet and its signs, he provocatively entitled his article, ‘King Nestor’s four-handled cups’. (I possess a copy he signed for his former classics master Patrick Hunter, who gave it to me not long before he died.)
Ventris called P641 ‘a sort of Rosetta stone’. Chadwick wrote: ‘I do not see how even the most sceptical can find cause to doubt this.’ Bennett admitted: ‘Looks hard to beat! and I thoroughly understand Blegen’s and your excitement.’ The tablet immediately became the pièce de résistance in all lectures given by Ventris or Chadwick.
On 24 June 1953, Ventris spoke at the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House in London, the very place in which he had first seen a Linear B tablet back in 1936 as a 14-year-old. The following day, The Times carried a report and – a rare honour for a scholarly discovery – also devoted a leader article, ‘On the threshold?’, to the talk. ‘Mr Ventris is scrupulous not to encourage extravagant hopes. Yet imagination cannot restrain itself from speculating on the possible enlargement of our historic horizons if the thalassocrats of three or four thousand years ago should prove able after all to communicate with us in a language that we know.… Shall we some day come upon the relics of that long succession of forgotten poets who must surely have shaped and tuned the sonorous organ of the Greek speech, as it must have been shaped and tuned through many generations to be capable of “the surge and thunder of the Odyssey”? The questions will not be silenced. All we have at present is a dozen doubtful words picked out of some magnate’s household books. But it is the first step that counts.’ Next to the leader was a piece entitled ‘At the summit of Everest’, by its climber Edmund Hillary. The coincidence was too much, and the decipherment was quickly dubbed ‘the Everest of Greek archaeology’ – to the considerable embarrassment of the decipherer.
Chadwick was unable to be there for the talk, so Ventris described to him the enthusiastic reaction, with ‘invidious comparisons to Everest!’ but the Greek ambassador looking ‘extremely somnolent, poor chap.’ The chief critic of the decipherment, Arthur Beattie, professor of Greek at Edinburgh University, attended too. According to Ventris, Beattie ‘swallowed the tripods and went away good-naturedly complaining that “this must be the most irregular writing system on record”.’ (In fact, he would remain virulently critical, as we shall see.) As for the Times leader, Ventris found it a bit ‘fanciful’ for his taste, and for once he regretted that it played down the concrete results: ‘Still it’s a historic page with “The summit of Everest”; and, additional coincidence, the announcement of my sister-in-law’s engagement. All three things we have struggled for for many years!’ (By way of celebrating a whole year of correspondence and collaboration, he now suggested that Chadwick and he move to Christian names and call each other John and Michael.)
Other papers picked up the story. One tabloid commented that Ventris ‘looks as though he would be more at home in a university rowing eight than probing the mystery of an unknown language’, while another had the same impression but preferred a rugger scrum. The Architects’ Journal noted: ‘It was pleasant to discover a Times leader the other day on architect Michael Ventris’s hobby – if that is not too flippant a word – of breaking the Minoan code. On this subject, which has been a world mystery since the time of Sir Arthur Evans, Michael Ventris gave an interesting broadcast last year; but a Times leader being in the nature of a Papal Bull, the last doubt has now been removed.’ Celebrity this was not – even by the pre-television standards of 1953. But the name Michael Ventris was now known not merely to a small group of classical scholars and architects but to hundreds of thousands of educated people in Britain – and soon in the United States and across Europe too.
Yet although Ventris, with Chadwick’s aid, had certainly taken more than the ‘first step’ mentioned by The Times, there were still formidable problems with the decipherment. Even the ‘tripods’ tablet, P641, contained contradictions and mysterious words, some of which scholars are still arguing over today. (We shall scrutinize one of the phrases in the next chapter.) ‘I’m only too conscious that Linear B is only one-quarter deciphered, at best; or that, if technically “deciphered”, we still can’t read the tablets extensively – which from the layman’s point of view isn’t much better’, Ventris confessed to Bennett, appending to his letter a passage about the difficult early days of Champollion’s decipherment taken from the German book on Egyptian hieroglyphs he had read as a young boy. The big task now, as he saw it, was to work with Chadwick and a growing number of others on a thorough-going study of the tablets that would convince even the most sceptical of minds that Linear B really could be read.
7
Documents in Mycenaean Greek
‘Not quite the Greek you taught me, I’m afraid!’
Inscription by Michael Ventris on his first post-decipherment publication sent to his former classics master, autumn 1953
‘I’m spending most of my time scrubbing floors at the new house at the moment’, Ventris told Chadwick at the end of August 1953. Three weeks later he, Lois and their two young children Nikki and Tessa, taking their Breuer furniture with them, moved into 19 North End, the modest but well-built house he had designed in the spring and summer of 1952 in a leafy private corner of Hampstead, just off the Heath. The long years at Highpoint – with their mixed memories of school holidays, his late mother Dorothea, the war, marriage, student y
ears as an architect, and endless poring over Linear B until he finally ‘cracked’ it – were over. A fresh phase was beginning in his life, both personally and with regard to the decipherment.
‘Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean archives’, written with Chadwick in late 1952, had just been published by the Journal of Hellenic Studies. Of course, a lot had happened in the nine months since the joint article was submitted in November, but this was the first solid scholarly exposition of the decipherment to appear in print and there was a rush for it among classicists and others – so much so that the paper was reprinted as a separate pamphlet and sold more than a thousand copies. Also, the hundreds of new tablets excavated by Blegen at Pylos in 1952, and a rather smaller number discovered by Wace at Mycenae, were about to become available for scrutiny (until now Ventris had seen only the celebrated ‘tripods’ tablet sent by Blegen in May). These tablets were virgin material, quite unknown pre-decipherment. Therefore they ought to provide an excellent check on the validity of Ventris’s phonetic values. Now the third and last phase of the decipherment, following the analysis phase (up to June 1952) and the substitution phase (June 1952 to mid-1953), could begin in earnest.
In the intellectual world, the ultimate test of an idea’s worth and the measure of one’s success in proposing it, is that professionals respond and begin to include the idea in their work – whether by incorporating it, rejecting it, or, more usually, by modifying it through sympathy mixed with scepticism. (Naturally credit is not always given to the original source!) From the middle of 1953 onwards, this was indeed the case with the Ventris decipherment. Scholars interested in the early Aegean scripts from across Europe and the United States quickly started to read Linear B. The overwhelming majority agreed that the script wrote a form of early Greek; but there was serious disagreement about how to interpret particular inscriptions. There were also various cranks and, as ever in archaeological decipherment, it was not always simple to discern who the cranks were. ‘After the Times article I had a letter from a crank, enclosed’, Ventris told Chadwick in July. ‘I thought the only way to see what he was up to was to try him out on the TRIPODS. And a pretty good hash it is; I’ve now broken off the engagement. The trouble is that, ridiculous as his ideas are, one always has the uneasy feeling of “there, but for the grace of God…”; and one’s worst nightmare is that one has oneself been a victim of a similar delusion.’ Being an ‘amateur’, Ventris was quite sensitive on the point.
He was wryly amused by the nationalist slant of some reactions. A well-known Greek scholar wrote (in Ventris’s translation): ‘We Greeks owe many thanks to the foreign scholars who have applied themselves with remarkable devotion to the laborious work of solving the riddle of the script and language, in which are written the age-old records of our ancestors found in the sacred soil of our Fatherland.’ While a Russian (again translated by Ventris) commented: ‘The data from the Pylos and Knossos tablets completely support the interpretation followed by Soviet science of the slave-based character of Cretan and Mycenaean society…and once again refute the modernizing prejudices still present in the works of many bourgeois historians.’
It is never easy to define the point at which a script can be said to be ‘deciphered’. Even with Egyptian hieroglyphic, there are words and passages which are almost totally obscure. When Linda Schele, a key figure in the Maya decipherment, was asked how much of the Mayan glyphs had been deciphered, she would always answer that it depended what you meant by ‘deciphered’. In 1993, a few years before her early death, she wrote: ‘Some glyphs can be translated exactly; we know the original word or its syllabic value. For other glyphs, we have the meaning (for example, we have evidence that a glyph means “to hold or grasp”), but we do not yet know the Mayan words. There are other glyphs for which we know the general meaning, but we haven’t found the original word; for example, we may know it involves war, marriage, or perhaps that the event always occurs before age 13, but we cannot associate the glyph with a precise action. For others, we can only recover their syntactical function; for example, we may know a glyph occurs in the position of a verb, but we have no other information. To me the most frustrating state is to have a glyph with known phonetic signs, so that we can pronounce the glyph, but we cannot find the word in any of the Mayan languages. If a glyph is unique or occurs in only a few texts, we have little chance of translating it.’
Linear B suffers from similar difficulties, although it is definitely more fully deciphered than the Mayan script. Right from the start, there have been accusations that the spelling rules are so loose that Linear B sign groups can be manipulated to produce Greek words that in reality are not present in the tablets. As Ventris told Patrick Hunter, his former classics teacher at Stowe, when sending him a copy of his joint paper with Chadwick: ‘Not quite the Greek you taught me, I’m afraid!’ – a fine example of his exquisite, gentle irony.
To Bennett, at the same time he pointed out that in the Cypriot script the sign (remember , polo, on page 36) can represent at least 15 different Greek syllables:
po bo pho
pon- bon- phon-
pom- bom- phom-
pō bō phō
p-
b-
ph-
Whereas in Linear B, he said, we might be faced with at least 39 alternatives ( is the Greek iota):
– each of which might be prefixed with an initial -s.
To explain the situation to outsiders – and at the many lectures he was now being asked to give – Ventris made a ‘toy’ out of cardboard (rather reminiscent of his simple model of a ‘grid’ which hung on the wall at Highpoint). It consisted of a box with little windows through which one could slide paper strips. Each movable strip corresponded to one Linear B syllabic sign and listed all its possible transliterations (written in Greek letters, rather than in roman script as above). The strips couldthenbe slid up and down or inserted in the windows in a different order so as to create all possible spelling permutations of a given set of syllabic signs. Ventris added a sketch for Bennett’s benefit, showing the four signs thought to spell the Greek word ‘tiripod(e)’, as featured in the famous ‘tripods’ tablet P641:
(Bennett, as a former wartime cryptographer, replied: ‘I may try to make one of your toys. They are just the sort of thing I used to play with for the army so I will feel right at home.’)
Soon, Bennett went to Greece in order to make drawings of the Pylos tablets discovered in 1952. From Athens he wrote ruefully, and perhaps a shade mischievously, to Ventris: ‘I don’t seem to invent inserted letters very easily or notice parallels in Greek, so that I will gladly let you do that end in time.’ Back in England, Ventris and Chadwick waited anxiously. In December, Bennett generously mailed a partial set of drawings to Ventris, adding: ‘I hope these will be of some use to you, and even more that you can enlighten me on them.… Once one starts putting values in the texts and looking up etymologies it is very hard to know when to stop. I have probably stayed too long on the other end of the job, but it also has to be done.’
The two collaborators decided on an experiment to test the validity of the decipherment. They would each, independently of the other, write detailed interpretations of the virgin Pylos tablets and mail them separately to Bennett in Athens. Only after doing so would they compare notes. Something similar had been attempted in 1857 (though neither Ventris nor Chadwick seems to have been conscious of the comparison), when four ‘rival’ scholars of cuneiform were asked by the Royal Asiatic Society to submit independent translations of a newly discovered inscription; this produced useful results at the early stage of the decipherment of Babylonian cuneiform.
In late January, Ventris fired off his interpretations: 29 closely typed pages minutely inscribed with Linear B in his trademark handwriting. Chadwick did the same, telling Bennett: ‘I expect you will have some good laughs when you come to compare the different versions.’ But the American scholar seems to have been stunned into silence by these two lingui
stic salvoes from England, contenting himself with a heartfelt thank you to Ventris for clarifying one particular sign group at long distance: ‘I’d not have seen it otherwise.’ The surface of the tablet in question was too damaged to identify the signs with any certainty, but Ventris’s suggested reading, based on the meaning of the surrounding signs as read using his phonetic values, had led Bennett to ‘see’ what his eyes would otherwise have missed. In a way, it was an apt response from this ace epigrapher who was no great linguist. Observation had been suggested by theory, rather than the other way around, as happens quite often in science; for example in astronomy, the planet Pluto was first observed after its existence had been deduced from an analysis of perturbations in the orbit of Uranus and Neptune.
When Ventris and Chadwick eventually got together at North End for the weekend, they too were fairly satisfied. Their twin analyses of the new Pylos tablets shared much common ground. But they were also uneasily aware that there were considerable differences between their two interpretations. Plainly the decipherment still had a long way to go.
At this point, in early 1954, a sizeable group of British classicists clambered on board the Linear B bandwagon, with varying degrees of confidence. Leonard Palmer, the professor of classical philology at Oxford, was perhaps the cleverest of them; and he made sure that everyone knew it. He and Chadwick enjoyed a prickly relationship, in which Professor Palmer liked to refer ostentatiously to Mr Chadwick. There seems little doubt that in Palmer’s view, ‘Ventris and Palmer’ would have been the appropriate combination for the history books, rather than Ventris and Chadwick. While there is no question that Palmer accepted the fundamental correctness of the decipherment and hugely admired Ventris personally, despite the architect’s un-Oxonian diffidence, he would nevertheless be severely critical of some of his interpretations (while implying that the blame for these probably lay with Chadwick!).
The Man Who Deciphered Linear B Page 11