The Man Who Deciphered Linear B

by Andrew Robinson

  ‘The most interesting fact about his work is that it forced [Michael Ventris] to propose a solution contrary to his own preconceptions.’

  John Chadwick, 1975

  Within months of his tragic death, those who had known Michael Ventris, and other admirers who had not, got together to found a memorial scholarship in his name. Under the joint umbrella of the Architectural Association and the Institute of Classical Studies in London, the scholarship was to be given to young architects and young scholars in Mycenaean Greek studies on the threshold of promising careers, with the award alternating between Ventris’s two fields. Founded in 1957, the scholarship gradually established itself and has been given to students annually ever since.

  Documents in Mycenaean Greek was published in the autumn of 1956, sadly too late for one of its authors. There were many reviews, both in the specialist journals and in the national press, such was the interest generated by the decipherment and by the personality of Ventris himself. Tom Webster, the moving spirit behind the London seminar, wrote in Antiquity: ‘Two impressions strike the reader at once. First the immense amount of scholarship of different kinds, linguistic, archaeological and historical, that has gone into it in an extraordinarily short time, since only three years separate the publication of the original article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies from the publication of this book. This period included a great deal of intensive work on the tablets in many different countries, and the authors have taken this into account and have dealt very justly and courteously with all their fellow-workers. The second impression is the beauty and clarity of the book production, which is up to the highest standards of the Cambridge Press.’ Later in the review, Webster remarked: ‘Thus the foundations are soundly laid for future work. They are sound because the authors are cautious; but because they are foundations laid by a cunning architect, they will determine to a large degree the shape of the building.’ And he concluded: ‘Enough has been said to show that this book opens a new world, and it is heartbreaking that the ingenuity, wisdom and sanity of Michael Ventris can no longer guide us in its exploration.’

  But other scholars were by no means so generous. Palmer from Oxford University, while signally saluting Ventris and the decipherment, was at pains to distance his solo achievement from his joint work with Chadwick. ‘One must regretfully acknowledge that there is much in the second half of Documents which is wholly unacceptable and even palpably absurd.’

  Beattie from Edinburgh University (last heard of at the celebrated June 1953 lecture by Ventris), went much further. Nicknamed ‘Linear Beattie’ by his friends, he had founded in Scotland what came to be mockingly called an ‘anti-decipherment seminar’. He had been sceptical about the decipherment right from the start, claiming in a 1952 letter to Chadwick, whom Beattie had taught at Cambridge, that he had tried the Greek solution some years previously and had found the evidence for it insufficient. But his first major published attack appeared (in the Journal of Hellenic Studies) only in 1956, which unfortunately for Beattie coincided with the very month of Ventris’s death. Thereafter, his accusations became ferocious and extremely libellous, although he took the precaution of accusing only Ventris of malfeasance and not Chadwick. In a so-called Plain Guide to the decipherment, Beattie openly stated that Ventris had ‘somehow’ obtained a drawing of the famous ‘tripods’ tablet from Pylos, not from Blegen in May 1953, but in early June 1952, immediately after its excavation, and had written Work Note 20 in the full, but private knowledge of this tablet: in other words, Ventris had ‘fixed’ the decipherment in advance. When Blegen subsequently stated the facts of P641’s excavation, showing that Ventris’s foreknowledge of the tablet was physically impossible, Beattie publicly withdrew his allegation – but substituted another even more fantastic: that a similar tablet had been communicated to Ventris at an even earlier stage in the decipherment. This he accompanied with some personal comments on Ventris which would be breathtakingly malicious were they not so comically off the mark, like some bathetic imitation of an Agatha Christie murder mystery. (‘Although the contents of all the Work Notes were guarded from the public eye by the author during his life and are kept unpublished by his supporters in England since his death, a complete set has recently come into the possession of Edinburgh University Library’ – and much more in the same vein.) Beattie’s odium scholasticum against the amateur Ventris broke all sane bounds and proved only that envy is corrosive, perhaps especially in the intellectual world.

  What is the point in raking over the embers of this scholarly animosity many decades after all but a tiny handful of incorrigible scholars has accepted the decipherment as valid? Chiefly because Beattie scored one authentic hit that still reverberates today, if allowance is made for its sarcastic ring. ‘We may safely discount any pretence that the decipherment is safeguarded by sound cryptographic method or that it is strictly controlled by the grid. The truth is that the grid was inadequate at the outset to control the first experimental identifications [i.e. the substitutions that produced the names of Cretan towns like Amnisos] and that it was quickly modified to accommodate an increasing number of conjectures.’

  As this account has shown, the decipherment was indeed not a triumph of logical deduction. It was emphatically not like a mathematical proof. In a well-known book on cryptography, The Codebreakers by David Kahn, the Linear B decipherment is said to ‘shine with a clean Euclidean beauty. In it, man thinks more purely rationally, depending less upon external information and more upon logical manipulation of the data to derive new conclusions, than perhaps anywhere else in the humanities.’ But this is nonsense – comforting though such an ideal may be to those who seek at least a few refuges of pure rationality outside the ‘hard’ sciences. In reality, the decipherment is something much more fascinating. Perhaps Chadwick encapsulated Ventris’s true approach the most succinctly when he wrote (not in the over-rationalized Decipherment of Linear B but in a much later piece): ‘The most interesting fact about his work is that it forced him to propose a solution contrary to his own preconceptions.’

  While it is right, and vital to vigorous intellectual life and scholarly activity, that we try to understand what arguments led Ventris to his key conclusion, and test their logical validity, the unavoidable fact is that the decipherment was an inextricable combination of intuition and logic, with the second controlling the (not always reliable) leaps of the first. This is why Ventris was a genius – and not a Beattie, or even a Chadwick or a Bennett.

  And we can go further, and say that the same is true of all great scientists. The myth that science proceeds only by the ‘scientific method’ – in which irrefutable knowledge of the physical world accumulates from the gradual accretion of experimental observations – dies hard, but die it should. One hesitates to quote Einstein here, given his iconic reputation as a rationalist, but he knew very well that science works through many kinds of mental activity. Meditating on the mystery of how Kepler discovered that the planets had orbits that were ellipses (a geometrical form that was itself a discovery of the ancient Greek geometers), Einstein wrote: ‘It seems that the human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things. Kepler’s marvellous achievement is a particularly fine example of the fact that knowledge cannot spring from experience alone but only from a comparison of the inventions of the intellect with the facts of observation.’ Ventris, one feels, would have entirely agreed with this. Inventing was what he was doing when he dreamt up the idea that Kober’s ‘triplets’ might contain the names of real Minoan towns. His painstaking comparison of his hypothesis with the actual sign groups fitted the facts. His hypothesis about Etruscan names in the tablets did not – and as a ‘scientist’ he abandoned it, albeit very reluctantly.

  As for what the humanities – archaeologists, historians, literary scholars and others – have learnt from the decipherment since Ventris’s death, the answer is, honestly speaking, a little disappointing, set beside the artistic treasures and legen
ds of Troy, Mycenae and Knossos. A ‘new world’ may have opened up for Greek specialists like Webster, but its boundaries are strictly circumscribed. No great battles, great thoughts or great poetry. The rate of discovery of tablets has slowed dramatically since Ventris’s time, though there have been a few minor excitements, such as a clay tablet found at Pylos in 1957 with a list of men and goats on one side and a drawing of a labyrinth on the other – presumably a doodle by an idle scribe, since the drawing has nothing to do with the list:

  Labyrinth drawing from Lang, American Journal of Archaeology, 1958.

  There has turned out to be nothing of literary value in Linear B: the tablets merely record prosaic details of palace administration – lists of names and their trades and lists of goods – though careful detective work on them has shed light on Mycenaean society as a whole, such as the possibility of human sacrifice mentioned in chapter 7. Here too, Ventris’s hunch about the future of Linear B studies, expressed to a surprised Bennett at the Gif meeting, has proved correct.

  In that last BBC broadcast, in May 1956, Ventris concluded: ‘There are further questions still, which Wace is fond of asking, but to which we may never be able to find an answer. The first of these is: “Did epic poetry of the school of Homer already exist in Mycenaean times, and was it perhaps already committed to writing?” The second is “Was knowledge of writing really lost suddenly in about 1200 B.C. [with the fall of Pylos], and was there really a period of about 400 years when the Greeks were quite illiterate, until the introduction of the Greek alphabet that we know?”’ Fifty years after Ventris’s ground-breaking decipherment, the answers to these interesting and significant questions still elude us.

  Further Reading

  As this book is not written primarily for scholars, I have not footnoted my sources, which are both published and unpublished. This note does not attempt to list all of them, because it is intended as a guide for those who want to explore various aspects of Michael Ventris and his work – his personal life; the decipherment of Linear B; the Minoan and Mycenaean world; and Ventris as an architect – without going into scholarly depth. Rather than listing further reading according to each chapter of the book, I have therefore divided the note into four sections according to the above categories. (Place of publication of books is the United Kingdom unless otherwise mentioned.)

  Ventris’s life

  The best source is the booklet, Michael Ventris Remembered, published by Stowe School in 1984, by Simon Tetlow, Ben Harris, David Roques and A. G. Meredith, with a foreword by John Chadwick. This was based on interviews done by three boys then at the school (Tetlow, Harris and Roques), which were ably edited by a master (Meredith). It gives a broad-ranging and lively portrait of Ventris, without being wholly reliable.

  Chapter 1 of John Chadwick’s The Decipherment of Linear B is a brief, somewhat formal sketch of Ventris’s life. There is an even briefer recollection of Ventris by Ian Martin in ‘Some memories of the early “Minoan Linear B Seminars”’, in the 44th Annual Report of the Institute of Classical Studies for 1996–97. Patrick Hunter wrote a substantial obituary in the Stowe school magazine, The Stoic, in March 1957. Other obituaries are in the Ventris Papers at the Institute of Classical Studies.

  Regarding Ventris’s early life up to his marriage, the Stowe archives have a number of letters written by Ventris’s parents and by himself to the staff; copies of Dorothea Ventris’s letters to Marcel Breuer are in the Ventris Papers; his letters to Naum Gabo and Ben Nicholson are in the Tate Gallery archives. An enjoyable account of Hampstead in the 1930s is View from the Long Chair, a memoir by Jack Pritchard (1984), with a long introduction by Fiona MacCarthy. For a detailed description of the building of Highpoint, see Lubetkin: Architecture and the Tradition of Progress, by John Allan (1992). An excellent account of Stowe in the 1930s is Roxburgh of Stowe, by Noel Annan (1965).

  On the war years, there are numerous personal letters written by Ventris to his wife, and his most interesting diary for 1945–46, in the Ventris Papers. The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book, 1939–45 by Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt (1985) describes the missions flown by 76 Squadron.

  The notes, drawings, cartoons and letters arising from Ventris’s visit to Stockholm with Oliver Cox and Graeme Shankland in 1947, are in the Ventris Papers. So too is the spring-backed design book kept by Ventris in the late 1940s.

  Prudence Smith’s account of Ventris’s BBC broadcast in 1952 appears in her memoirs, The Morning Light: A South African Childhood Revealed (Cape Town, 2000).

  On his life after the decipherment, there are some letters to his wife written from Greece in the Ventris Papers, which also contain his letter rejecting the offer of the Waynflete lectures at Oxford University. His ‘final’, August 1956 letter is in the possession of Colin Boyne.

  The decipherment of Linear B

  Ventris’s first publication on Linear B, ‘Introducing the Minoan language’, appeared in the American Journal of Archaeology, 44, 1940. The same journal published articles by Alice Kober in 1945, 1946 and 1948, most notably ‘The Minoan scripts: fact and theory’, 52, 1948, and also Emmett Bennett Jr’s article, ‘Fractional quantities in Minoan bookkeeping’, 54, 1950.

  The letters written by Ventris to Kober and Bennett were deposited by Bennett in the PASP archives of the University of Texas at Austin, while those written to Sir John Myres are in the Ashmolean Museum archives in Oxford.

  The non-technical descriptions of the decipherment by Ventris are: ‘Deciphering Europe’s earliest scripts’, in the Listener, 10 July 1952; ‘A note on decipherment methods’, in Antiquity, 27, 1953; and chapter 1 of Documents in Mycenaean Greek. The script of his May 1956 BBC broadcast is in the Chadwick Papers at Cambridge University, and his script of another BBC programme, drafted by him in 1956 and broadcast in a modified form after his death, is in the Ventris Papers. His article, ‘King Nestor’s four-handled cups’, describing the famous Pylos ‘tripods’ tablet, appears in the American journal Archaeology, 7, 1954.

  The Work Notes appear in facsimile in Ventris’s Work Notes on Minoan Language Research and Other Unedited Papers, edited by Anna Sacconi (Rome, 1988). This book includes his 1949 questionnaire to scholars and the resulting Mid-Century Report (‘The languages of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations’). Needless to say, this book is tough going even for Linear B specialists.

  John Chadwick’s The Decipherment of Linear B, originally published in 1958, appeared in a second edition in 1967, to which he added a new postscript in 1992 (the current edition); he also wrote Linear B and Related Scripts (1987), which contains a chapter on the decipherment. In 1973, Chadwick published a technical article which attempted to explicate the Work Notes, later republished as an appendix in Sacconi’s edition of the Work Notes.

  The joint publication by Ventris and Chadwick, ‘Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean archives’, appears in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, 73, 1953.

  The Ventris–Chadwick correspondence is in the Chadwick Papers, which also contain Bennett’s letters to Ventris and correspondence between Chadwick and other scholars interested in the decipherment.

  The proceedings of the ‘Minoan Linear B Seminar’ at the Institute of Classical Studies have not been published, but a set of minutes for 1954–56 is in the Ventris Papers. The proceedings of the April 1956 colloquium at Gif appear in Etudes Mycéniennes, edited by Michel Lejeune (Paris, 1956).

  Reviews of the decipherment are too numerous and generally too technical to mention, except for three: A. J. Beattie’s notorious pamphlet, A Plain Guide to the Ventris Decipherment of the Mycenaean Linear B Script (Berlin, 1958); an objective if somewhat uninspired survey, The Linear B Decipherment Controversy Re-examined, by Saul Levin (New York, 1964); and two excellent papers, by Emmett Bennett Jr and Maurice Pope, in Problems in Decipherment, edited by Yves Duhoux, Thomas G. Palaima and John Bennet (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1989). Palaima has written several important articles on the decipherment during the
last decade or so, and a long article on Alice Kober.

  The Minoan and Mycenaean World

  As regards Linear B, the chief publication is of course Documents in Mycenaean Greek, by Ventris and Chadwick (1956), much added to by Chadwick in a second edition (1973). However, a large proportion is technical. A summary appears in the post-decipherment chapters of The Decipherment of Linear B.

  Chadwick followed this with a non-technical book, The Mycenaean World (1976), which is still in print. More recent books are: The Aegean Bronze Age by Oliver Dickinson (1994), The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age by J. Lesley Fitton (1995), and Aegean Art and Architecture by Donald Preziosi and Louise A. Hitchcock (1999).

  On Sir Arthur Evans and other archaeologists involved in the Linear B story, see Evans’s The Palace of Minos at Knossos (1921–35), From the Silent Earth: The Greek Bronze Age by Joseph Alsop (1964), The Villa Ariadne by Dilys Powell (1973), Arthur Evans and the Palace of Minos by Ann Brown (1989), and Cretan Quests: British Explorers, Excavators and Historians, edited by Davina Huxley (2000).

  Ventris as an architect

  Some drawings done by Ventris and his group as students in the 1940s are in the archives of the Architectural Association and the Royal Institute of British Architects. His writings on architecture at this time appear mainly in Plan, the magazine of the Architectural Students Association, notably ‘Function and arabesque’, in Plan, 1, and ‘Group working’, in Plan, 2, 1948.

  One or two archaeological site drawings by Ventris done at Emborio (Emporio) appear in Excavations in Chios 1952–55: Greek Emporio, by John Boardman (1967).

  The first part of his report for his 1956 research fellowship appears as ‘The handling of architects’ information’, parts 1 and 2, in the Architects’ Journal, 15 and 22 November 1956. Dargan Bullivant has a copy of Ventris’s February 1956 proposal to the research board for the fellowship.