The Man Who Deciphered Linear B

168 Pages·2012·8.55 MB·English

by  Andrew Robinson

About the Author
Andrew Robinson is a King’s Scholar of Eton College, where he won the
headmaster’s Greek grammar prize, and holds a degree from Oxford University;
he was also a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
His many books include The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and
Pictograms and Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered
Scripts, and biographies of Thomas Young (The Last Man Who Knew
Everything) and Jean-François Champollion (Cracking the Egyptian Code).
Other titles by Andrew Robinson published by Thames & Hudson include: The Scientists: An Epic of
Discovery
Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture
The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms
Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion
Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts
Other titles of interest published by Thames & Hudson include: Minoan and Mycenaean Art
Breaking the Maya Code
See our websites
http://www.thamesandhudson.com
http://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 An Unconventional Upbringing
2 The War Years
3 Embryo Architect
4 Architect and Decipherer
5 Into the Minoan Labyrinth
6 Breakthrough
7 Documents in Mycenaean Greek
8 Triumph and Tragedy
Postscript
Further Reading
Index
Copyright
To the memory of Antony Coulthard (1918–45), a gifted linguist and the
Uncle I never knew
Acknowledgments
I first became interested in Michael Ventris in 1989, while researching a
television programme about his decipherment of Linear B. Although the
programme was not made, I found myself writing a few pages about the
decipherment in my 1995 book, The Story of Writing, and becoming curious
about the somewhat shadowy personality behind the achievement. I also became
friendly with his collaborator John Chadwick, author of The Decipherment of
Linear B, who helped me considerably until his death in 1998.
While writing this small book, which is obviously not a full biography, it has
been pleasant to discover that Ventris’s generosity and cooperative spirit live on
nearly half a century after his death. I have enjoyed invaluable help from his
surviving friends and from younger admirers of all that he achieved in his short
life, in both decipherment and architecture.
In the world of classical studies, I am indebted to Alicia Totolos, former
secretary of the Institute of Classical Studies in London, who went to great
trouble to make available Ventris’s letters and papers, including the press
coverage of the decipherment; to John Killen, emeritus professor of Mycenaean
Greek at Cambridge University, a close associate of John Chadwick, who put
Chadwick’s papers on the decipherment at my disposal; and to Tom Palaima,
professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin, who sent me copies of
Ventris’s letters to Emmett Bennett Jr and Alice Kober from his PASP archives.
All three also shared with me their personal knowledge of the subject.
In the world of architecture, Oliver Cox, a close friend of Ventris as a student
at the Architectural Association school, was constantly encouraging and put me
in touch with architects and others who knew Ventris. These include Colin
Boyne, Dargan Bullivant, Michael Grice, David Medd and Edward Samuel, to
all of whom I am grateful, especially Colin Boyne, former editor of the
Architects’ Journal, and Dargan Bullivant, both of whom provided essential
background for understanding Ventris’s final architectural project.
Among the Ventris family, I am grateful to his grandson Björn Ventris (son of
the late Nikki Ventris) and Björn’s mother Renee Ventris, who showed me
papers and photographs and discussed Ventris’s family life; to his daughter
Tessa Ventris, who kindly granted permission to quote from Ventris’s letters and
writings; and to Carol Horton, half-sister of Lois Ventris.
Grateful thanks are also due to Dr John Bennet (of Oxford University) and
Tony Meredith (of Stowe School) for essential help, and to Prof. Emmett
Bennett Jr, Prof. Sir John Boardman, Jean Cox, Prof. Eric Handley, Rachel and
Sinclair Hood, the late Patrick Hunter, Prof. Maurice Pope, Dr Tessa Rajak, John
Renton, Robin Richards, Dr Sue Sherratt, Dr John Simopoulos and the late
Prudence Smith.
Finally, I thank the staff of Thames & Hudson for the care and intelligence
they have shown in producing the book. Jamie Camplin, my longstanding editor,
deserves a personal mention, even though he has a Ventris-like reticence about
being acknowledged. He is certainly among the best there is.
London, August 2001
Introduction
‘There is a land called Crete, set in the wine-dark sea, lovely and fertile
and ocean-rounded. Those who live in this land are many, indeed past
counting, and there are ninety cities there. The population speaks many
tongues; there are Achaeans, there are the brave True Cretans, the
Cydonians, the triply divided Dorians and the noble Pelasgians. Among the
cities is mighty Knossos; its king was once Minos, who every ninth year
took counsel with Zeus himself.’
Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, Book XIX
A mere two hundred years ago, the world’s oldest known languages were Greek,
Latin and Hebrew. History, in the sense of readable written records, began no
earlier than about 600 B.C. Although the antiquity of inscriptions in Egypt and the
Near East was suspected, nothing definite could be said about it, beyond what
was written in those parts of the Old Testament that seemed historical, and in the
confusing accounts of ancient historians and geographers such as Herodotus and
Strabo. The age of civilization in India, China and the Americas was terra
incognita.
But then, around 1805, a French schoolboy, Jean-François Champollion,
seeing some of the treasures just brought back from Egypt by Napoleon’s
savants, became determined to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Twenty years
later, with the help of the Rosetta stone, Champollion succeeded and was able to
read the script of the pharaohs; as a direct result, the historical time span was
doubled, extending back to about 3000 B.C. Later in the 19th century, the
cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia were also deciphered; and scholars were able
to understand a range of Near Eastern tongues and read the records and literature
of ancient Sumer, Babylon and Assyria, comparable in age with those of Egypt.
Europe, however, still seemed to possess no civilization older than the glories
of classical Greece – unless one included the tantalizing stories of the Trojan war
composed by Homer at an uncertain date and orally transmitted to later writers.
Heinrich Schliemann’s famous excavations at Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s,
stimulated by his passion for Homer, put paid to that mistaken impression for
ever. Here were golden treasures and a powerful citadel with a Lion Gate worthy
of Homer’s King Agamemnon, belonging to a Bronze Age civilization dating to