![]() I am reviewing the Second Edition published in 1967. In his book The Decipherment of Linear B, first published in 1958, classical linguist John Chadwick, who collaborated with Ventris on the decipherment, tells the story of how this ancient writing system was discovered and decrypted. ![]() Tragically, Ventris died soon after, in his mid-thirties. From the 1930s to the 1950s, many philologists tried unsuccessfully to decipher this writing, until British architect Michael Ventris discovered the key to cracking the code. The script was dubbed Linear B (as opposed to Linear A, an even earlier script). Eventually linguists and archaeologists established that the writing dates to around 1450 BC. Caches of these tablets were found primarily at two sites: the Minoan palace of Knossos on the island of Crete, and the Mycenaean city of Pylos on the Greek mainland. ![]() ![]() In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archaeologists working in Greece discovered a number of clay tablets inscribed with a previously undiscovered system of writing. ![]()
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