Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B, the syllabic script used to write Mycenaean Greek [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B], died #OnThisDay 70 years ago.
Others had paved the way, notably Alice Kober [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Kober], who had analysed the script and discovered evidence of inflection, which was a starting-point for Ventris to correlate signs representing syllables that had (e.g.) the same consonant sound but different vowel sounds.
John Chadwick, the philologist who became Ventris's collaborator after his initial breakthrough, wrote an excellent account of the decipherment for the non-specialist in ‘The Decipherment of Linear B’: https://archive.org/details/deciphermentofli0000unse_o2q4 (multiple copies on @internetarchive)
Attached is the ‘tripod tablet’, whose discovery was an important confirmation of the correctness of Ventris’s system, and its transcription from Chadwick's book.
#language #linguistics #philology #decipherment #LinearB #Histodons #GreekLanguage #Greek #AncientHistory #OTD
