Editing Linear B (section)

== Discovery and decipherment ==
[[File:Clay Tablet inscribed with Linear B script.jpg|thumb|Tablet KN Fp 13, discovered by [[Arthur Evans]]]]
[[File:Linear B (Mycenaean Greek) NAMA Tablette 7671.jpg|thumb|Tablet MY Oe 106 (obverse) exhibited at the Greek [[National Archaeological Museum, Athens|National Archaeological Museum]].<br />Bottom: tracing of the inscription (obverse).<br />Right: Tracing of the reverse side depicting a male figure.]]

=== Ancient Greece ===
The Greeks of the historical era were unable to decipher Linear B, but its ideograms are sometimes mentioned by ancient authors.<ref>Forsdyke, ''Greece Before Homer'', p. 40.</ref> For example, [[Plutarch]] gives an account of the Spartan king [[Agesilaus II]] (r. 400–360 BC) sending a bronze tablet with "many letters marvellously old, for nothing could be made of them" to Egyptian priests in the hope they could understand them.<ref>Forsdyke, ''Greece Before Homer'', pp. 41, 42.</ref>

=== Arthur Evans's classification of scripts ===
The [[United Kingdom|British]] archaeologist [[Arthur Evans]], keeper of the [[Ashmolean Museum]], was presented by Greville Chester in 1886 with a sealstone from Crete engraved with a writing he took to be Mycenaean.<ref>{{harvnb|Ventris|Chadwick|1973|p=8}}.</ref> [[Heinrich Schliemann]] had encountered signs similar to these, but had never identified the signs clearly as writing, relating in his major work on Mycenae that "of combinations of signs resembling inscriptions I have hitherto only found three or four ...."<ref>{{cite book|page=[https://archive.org/details/mycenaenarrative1880schl/page/114 114]|title=Mycenæ|url=https://archive.org/details/mycenaenarrative1880schl|first1=Heinrich|last1=Schliemann|first2=William Ewart|last2=Gladstone|location=New York|publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons|year=1880|isbn=978-0-405-09851-2}}</ref> In 1893 Evans purchased more sealstones in Athens, verifying from the antiquarian dealers that the stones came from Crete. During the next year he noticed the script on other artefacts in the Ashmolean. In 1894 he embarked for [[Crete]] in search of the script. Soon after arrival, at [[Knossos]] he saw the sign of the double axe on an excavated wall, considering this the source of the script. Subsequently, he found more stones from the various ruins being worn by Cretan women as [[amulet]]s called {{lang|grc|γαλόπετρες}} "milk-stones", thought to encourage the production of breast milk.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Crawford|first=James|title=Fallen glory: the lives and deaths of history's greatest buildings|date=2019|publisher=Picador|isbn=978-1-250-11831-8|location=New York|pages=45|oclc=1076499808}}</ref>

Starting in 1894, Evans published his theories that the signs evidenced various phases in the development of a writing system in ''[[The Journal of Hellenic Studies]]'', the first article being "Primitive Pictographs and a Prae-Phoenician Script from Crete".<ref>{{cite journal|first=A.J.|last=Evans|title=Primitive Pictographs and a Prae-Phoenician Script, from Crete and the Peloponnese|journal=Journal of Hellenic Studies|volume=14|year=1894|pages=270–372, 394|url=https://archive.org/details/journalofhelleni14soci|doi=10.2307/623973|jstor=623973|s2cid=163720432 }}</ref> In these articles Evans distinguished between "pictographic writing" and "a linear system of writing". He did not explicitly define these terms, causing some confusion among subsequent writers concerning what he meant, but in 1898 he wrote<ref>{{cite journal|first=Arthur J.|last=Evans|journal=Journal of Hellenic Studies|volume=XVII|pages=327–395|title=Further Discoveries of Cretan and Aegean Script|year=1898|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PxgTAAAAYAAJ&q=Arthur+Evans+Crete|doi=10.2307/623835|jstor=623835|hdl=2027/hvd.32044005544283|s2cid=163638328 |hdl-access=free}}</ref> "These linear forms indeed consist of simple geometrical figures which unlike the more complicated pictorial class were little susceptible to modification," and "That the linear or quasi-alphabetic signs ... were in the main ultimately derived from the rudely scratched line pictures belonging to the infancy of art can hardly be doubted."

Meanwhile, Evans began to negotiate for the land purchase of the Knossos site. He established the Cretan Exploration Fund, with only his own money at first, and by 1896 the fund had purchased one-fourth of Kephala Hill, on which the ruins were located, with first option to buy the rest. However, he could not obtain a [[firman]] excavation permit from the Ottoman government. He returned to Britain. In January 1897, the Christian population of Crete staged its final insurrection against the Ottoman Empire. The last Ottoman troops were ferried off the island by the British fleet on 5 December 1898.<ref>{{cite book|title=The Royal Navy|first1=William Laird|last1=Clowes|first2=Clements Robert|last2=Markham|first3=Alfred Thayer|last3=Mahan|first4=Herbert Wrigley|last4=Wilson|first5=Theodore|last5=Roosevelt|first6=Leonard George Carr|last6=Laughton|year=1903|publisher=Sampson, Low, Marston and Company|location=London|volume=VII|pages=444–448|isbn=978-1-86176-017-3|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1n1nAAAAMAAJ&q=Turkey+Crete&pg=PA444}}</ref> In that year also, Evans and his friends returned to complete purchase of the site. By this time, the Fund had other contributors as well.<ref>{{cite book|title=Arthur Evans and the Palace of Minos|first=Cynthia Ann|last=Brown|edition=Ashmolean Museum: illustrated|publisher=Ashmolean Museum|year=1983|location=Oxford|isbn=9780900090929|pages=[https://archive.org/details/arthurevanspala00annb/page/15 15–30]|url=https://archive.org/details/arthurevanspala00annb/page/15}}</ref> In 1899, the Constitution of a new [[Cretan State|Cretan Republic]] went into effect. Once Evans had received permission to excavate from the local authorities, excavation on the hill began on 23 March 1900.

According to Evans's report to the [[British School at Athens]] for that year,<ref name=repo>{{cite journal|journal=The Annual of the British School at Athens|issue=VI: Session 1899–1900|year=1901|first=Arthur J.|last=Evans|title=Knossos: Summary Report of the Excavations in 1900: I The Palace|pages=3–70 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=000pAAAAYAAJ&q=tablets+April+Knosos+OR+Knossos&pg=PA18}}</ref> on 5 April, the excavators discovered the first large cache ever of Linear B tablets among the remains of a wooden box in a disused [[terracotta]] bathtub. Subsequently, caches turned up at multiple locations, including the Room of the Chariot Tablets, where over 350 pieces from four boxes were found. The tablets were {{convert|4.5|cm|in|abbr=on}} to {{convert|19.5|cm|in|abbr=on}} long by {{convert|1.2|cm|in|abbr=on}} to {{convert|7.2|cm|in|abbr=on}} wide and were scored with horizontal lines over which text was written in about 70 characters. Even in this earliest excavation report, Evans could tell that "a certain number of quasi-pictorial characters also occur which seem to have an ideographic or determinative meaning."<ref name=repo/>

The excavation was over for that year by 2 June. Evans reported: "only a comparatively small proportion of the tablets were preserved in their entirety,"<ref name=repo/> the causes of destruction being rainfall through the roof of the storage room, crumbling of small pieces, and being thrown away by workmen who failed to identify them. A report on 6 September to the [[Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland]]<ref>{{cite journal|journal=Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland|volume=XXX (New Series, III)|year=1900|first=Arthur J.|last=Evans|title=Crete: Systems of Writing|issue=90|pages=91–93 |doi=10.2307/2842725|jstor=2842725| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=q8QEAAAAYAAJ&q=Arthur+Evans+1894&pg=RA3-PA91|url-access=subscription}}</ref> began to use some of the concepts characteristic of Evans's later thought: "palace of Knossos" and "palace of [[Minos]]". ''[[Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography]]'', 1900,<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|encyclopedia=Appletons' Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1900|title=Archaeology: Crete|volume=Third Series, V; Whole Series, XI|pages=25–28|year=1901 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DEwoAAAAMAAJ&q=Arthur+Evans+1894&pg=PA25}}</ref> notes that Evans took up Stillman's theme that the palace was the [[labyrinth]] of mythology in which the half-bovine son of King [[Minos]] lurked. In the report, the tablets are now called a "linear script" as opposed to the "hieroglyphic or conventionalized pictographic script". The linear script has characters that are "of a free, upright, European character" and "seem to have been for the most part syllabic". Evans reasserts the ideographic idea: "a certain number are unquestionably ideographic or determinative."

The years after 1900 were consumed by excavations at Knossos and the discovery and study by Evans of tablets, with a projected comprehensive work on Cretan scripts to be called ''Scripta Minoa''. A year before the publication of volume I, he began to drop hints that he now believed the linear script was two scripts, to be presented in the forthcoming book.

In ''Scripta Minoa I'',<ref>{{cite book|title=Scripta Minoa: The Written Documents of Minoan Crete: With Special Reference to the Archives of Knossos|first=Arthur J.|last=Evans|author-link=Arthur Evans|volume=I: The Hieroglyphic and Primitive Linear Classes with an Account of the Discovery of the Pre-Phoenician Scripts, their Place in Minoan Story and their Mediterranean Relations: with Plates, Tables and Figures in the Text|location=Oxford|year=1909|publisher=The Clarendon Press|url=https://archive.org/details/scriptaminoawrit01evanuoft}}</ref> which appeared in 1909, he explained that the discovery of the [[Phaistos Disc]] in July 1908 had caused him to pull the book from the presses so that he could include the disk by permission, as it had not yet been published. On the next page<ref>''Scripta Minoa I'', page ix.</ref> he mentioned that he was also including by permission of [[Federico Halbherr]] of the [[Italian School of Archaeology at Athens|Italian Mission in Crete]] unpublished tablets from [[Hagia Triada]] written in a linear script of "Class A". To what degree if any Halbherr was responsible for Evans's division of the "linear script" into "Class A" and "Class B" is not stated. The Knossos tablets were of Class B, so that Evans could have perceived Class A only in tablets from elsewhere, and so recently that he needed permission to include the examples.

Evans summarized the differences between the two scripts as "type" or "form of script;' that is, varieties in the formation and arrangement of the characters. For example, he says "the clay documents belonging to Class A show a certain approximation in their forms to those presenting the hieroglyphic inscriptions ... the system of numerals is also in some respects intermediate between that of the hieroglyphic documents and that of the linear Class B."<ref>''Scripta Minoa I'', page 36.</ref>
{{check quotation}}
The first volume covered "the Hieroglyphic and Primitive Linear Classes" in three parts: the "pre-Phoenician Scripts of Crete", the "Pictorial Script" and "the Phaistos Disk". One or two more volumes publishing the Linear A and Linear B tablets were planned, but Evans ran out of time; the project required more than one man could bring to it. For a good many of the years left to him, he was deeply enmeshed in war and politics in the Balkans. When he did return to Knossos, completion and publication of the palace excavations took priority. His greatest work, ''Palace of Minos'', came out in 1935. It did include scattered descriptions of tablets. He died in 1941, soon after Nazi forces [[Battle of Crete|invaded Crete]].

The Knossos tablets had remained in the museum at Irakleion, Crete, where many of them now were missing. The unpublished second volume consisted of notes by Evans and plates and fonts created by Clarendon Press. In 1939, [[Carl Blegen]] had uncovered the Pylos Tablets; pressure was mounting to finish ''Scripta Minoa II.'' After Evans's death, [[Alice Kober]], assistant to [[John Myres]] and a major transcriber of the Knossos tablets, prompted Myres to come back from retirement and finish the work. [[Emmett L. Bennett, Jr.]] added more transcriptions. The second volume came out in 1952 with Evans cited as author and Myres as editor,<ref>{{cite book|title=Scripta Minoa: The Written Documents of Minoan Crete: With Special Reference to the Archives of Knossos|first=Arthur J.|last=Evans|author-link=Arthur Evans|volume=II: The Archives of Knossos: Clay Tablets Inscribed in Linear Script B Edited from Notes, and Supplemented by John L. Myres|location=Oxford|year=1952|publisher=The Clarendon Press|url=http://diglit.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/evans1952/0003/ocr?sid=c8644f1a9472ba6a583ab51c77803b6a}}</ref> just before the discovery that Linear B writes an early form of Greek. An impatient Ventris and Chadwick declared: "Two generations of scholars had been cheated of the opportunity to work constructively on the problem."<ref>''Documents in Mycenaean Greek'', page 11.</ref>

===Early attempts===

Despite the limited source materials, during this time there were efforts to decipher the newly discovered Cretan script. Australian classicist [[Florence Stawell]] published an interpretation of the Phaistos Disc in the April 1911 issue of ''[[The Burlington Magazine]]''.<ref>{{Cite journal|jstor = 858643|title = An Interpretation of the Phaistos Disk|journal = The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs|volume = 19|issue = 97|pages = 23–38|last1 = Stawell|first1 = F. Melian|year = 1911}}</ref> She followed this with the book ''A Clue to the Cretan Scripts'', published in 1931. Stawell declared all three Cretan script forms to represent early Homeric Greek, and offered her attempts at translations.<ref>Stawell, F. Melian, "Suggestions towards an Interpretation of the Minoan Scripts.", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 120–41, 1924</ref> Also in 1931, F. G. Gordon's ''Through Basque to Minoan'' was published by the Oxford University Press. Gordon attempted to prove a close link between the [[Basque language]] and Linear B, without lasting success.<ref>Chadwick, ''Decipherment...'' p.28</ref>

In 1949, [[Bedřich Hrozný]] published ''Les Inscriptions Crétoises, Essai de déchiffrement'', a proposed decipherment of the Cretan scripts.<ref>Chsdwick, Decipherment.., pp27–8</ref> Hrozny was internationally renowned as the translator of [[Hittite language|Hittite]] [[cuneiform]] decades previously. His Minoan translations into academic French, though, proved to be considerably subjective, and incorrect.

From the 1930s to 1950s there was correspondence between, and papers published by, various international academic figures. These included Johannes Sundwall, K. D. Ktistopoulos, Ernst Sittig and [[V. I. Georgiev]].<ref>Chadwick, Decipherment pp30–32</ref> None of them succeeded with decipherment, yet they added to knowledge and debate.

=== Alice Kober's triplets ===

About the same time, [[Alice Kober]] studied Linear B and managed to construct grids, linking similar symbols in groups of threes.<ref>Fox, (2013) pp.163–7</ref> Kober noticed that a number of Linear B words had common roots and suffixes. This led her to believe that Linear B represented an inflected language, with nouns changing their endings depending on their case. However, some characters in the middle of the words seemed to correspond with neither a root nor a suffix. Because this effect was found in other known languages, Kober surmised that the odd characters were bridging syllables, with the beginning of the syllable belonging to the root and the end belonging to the suffix. This was a reasonable assumption, since Linear B had far too many characters to be considered alphabetic and too few to be [[logogram|logographic]]; therefore, each character should represent a syllable. Kober's systematic approach allowed her to demonstrate the existence of three grammatical cases and identify several pairs of signs that shared vowels or consonants with one another.<ref name="Pope2008">{{cite book |last1=Pope |first1=Maurice |chapter=The Decipherment of Linear B |editor1-last=Duhoux |editor1-first=Yves |editor2-last=Davies |editor2-first=Anna Morpurgo |title=A Companion to Linear B: Mycenaean Texts and their World |volume=1 |location=Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium |publisher=Peeters |date=2008 |pages=3–11 |isbn=9789042918481}}</ref><ref>[http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~hayward/crypto/kober.pdf] Kober, Alice E., "The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory.", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 82–103, 1948</ref>

Kober also showed that the two-symbol word for 'total' at the end of livestock and personnel lists, had a different symbol for gender. This gender change with one letter, usually a vowel, is most frequent in Indo-European languages.<ref>Robinson, (2002) p.71</ref> Kober had rejected any speculation on the language represented, preferring painstaking cataloguing and analysis of the actual symbols,<ref>Fox, (2013) pp.107–9</ref> though she did believe it likely that Linear A and Linear B represented different languages.<ref name="Pope2008" />

=== Emmett L. Bennett's transcription conventions ===

The convention for numbering the symbols still in use today was first devised by [[Emmett L. Bennett Jr.]] Working alongside fellow academic Alice Kober, by 1950 Bennett had deciphered the metrical system, based on his intensive study of Linear B tablets unearthed at [[Pylos]]. He concluded that those tablets contained exactly the same script as the Linear B found at Knossos, and he classified and assigned identification numbers to the Linear B signs as he prepared a publication on the Pylos tablets.<ref name="Pope2008" /> Like Kober, Bennett was also an early proponent of the idea that Linear A and B represented different languages.<ref name="Pope2008" /> His book ''The Pylos Tablets'' became a crucial resource for Michael Ventris, who later described it as "a wonderful piece of work".<ref>[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/9034011/Emmett-Bennett.html Emmett L. Bennett Jr – obituary – ''Daily Telegraph'', London, 23 January 2012]</ref>

=== Michael Ventris' identification as Greek ===
[[File:Linear B tablet An 35.svg|thumb|190px|Illustration of a Linear B tablet from [[Pylos]]]]
In 1935, the [[British School at Athens]] was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition at [[Burlington House]], London. Among the speakers was [[Arthur Evans]], then 84 years old; a teenage [[Michael Ventris]] was present in the audience.<ref>[https://sites.utexas.edu/scripts/files/2020/05/1993-TGP-MichaelVentrisBlueprint.pdf] Thomas G Palaima, "Michael Ventris's Blueprint: Letters reveal how a British architect and two American scholars worked to decipher a Bronze Age script and read the earliest writings in western civilization", Discovery: Research and Scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin, 1993</ref> In 1940, the 18-year-old Ventris had an article ''Introducing the Minoan Language'' published in the ''[[American Journal of Archaeology]]''.<ref>Robinson, (2002) pp32–3</ref><ref>Ventris, M. G. F., "Introducing the Minoan Language.", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 494–520, 1940</ref> After wartime service as a navigator with [[RAF Bomber Command]], and a post-war year in Occupied Germany, he returned to civilian life, and completed qualification as an architect. Ventris continued with his interest in Linear B, corresponding with known scholars, who usually but not always replied.<ref>Chadwick, ''Decipherment'' 1961 Pelican edition pp. 47–9</ref>

Ventris and [[John Chadwick]], a university lecturer in Ancient Greek philology, performed the bulk of the decipherment of Linear B between 1951 and 1953. At first Ventris chose his own numbering method, but later switched to Bennett's system. His initial decipherment was achieved using Kober's classification tables, to which he applied his own theories. Some Linear B tablets had been discovered on the Greek mainland. Noticing that certain symbol combinations appeared only on the tablets found in Crete, he conjectured that these might be names of places on the island. This proved to be correct. Working with the symbols he could decipher from this, Ventris soon unlocked much text and determined that the underlying language of Linear B was in fact Greek. This contradicted general scientific views of the time, and indeed Ventris himself had previously agreed with Evans's hypothesis that Linear B was not Greek.<ref name="Pope2008" /> Ventris's first public announcement of his breakthrough came on 1 July 1952, on [[BBC Radio]], with Ventris describing the language of Linear B as "A difficult and archaic Greek, seeing that it's five hundred years older than Homer, and written in a rather abbreviated form, but Greek nevertheless."<ref>{{cite web |title=''In Search of the Trojan War'' Episode Two |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc8I2IuVxEw?t=3120 |website=YouTube |publisher=British Broadcasting Corporation |access-date=25 October 2024 |date=1985}}</ref> Ventris' discovery was of significance in demonstrating a Greek-speaking Minoan-Mycenaean culture on Crete, and thus presenting Greek in writing centuries earlier than had been previously accepted.<ref>[[Jacquetta Hawkes]] ''Dawn of the Gods'' 1972 Sphere Books pp. 49–51</ref> Chadwick, who helped Ventris develop his decipherment of the text and discover the vocabulary and grammar of Mycenaean Greek, noted:<ref>{{Cite book| publisher = Brill Archive| isbn = 978-90-04-08934-1| last1 = Best| first1 = Jan G. P.| last2 = Woudhuizen| first2 = Fred C.| title = Lost Languages from the Mediterranean| date = 1989 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=resUAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA49}}</ref><blockquote>That any Linear B tablets are written in a language other than Greek still remains to be demonstrated; but that words and usages not exactly paralleled in later Greek occur is both certain and to be expected. But we must not resort to "non-Greek" whenever we come up against an insoluble problem.</blockquote>
The first edition of their book, ''Documents in Mycenaean Greek'', was published in 1956, shortly after Ventris's death in an automobile accident.<ref name="Pope2008" /> 

The Ventris decipherment did not immediately meet with universal approval,<ref>Treweek, A. P., "Chain reaction or house of cards? An examination of the validity of the Ventris decipherment", Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, no. 4, pp. 10–26, 1957</ref> and was initially viewed with some scepticism.{{Sfn|Tracy|2018|pp=1-16}} Professor [[Arthur James Beattie|A. J. Beattie]] of Edinburgh published his doubts in the later 1950s. Saul Levin of the State University of New York considered that Linear B was partly Greek but with an earlier substrate, in his 1964 book ''The Linear B controversy reexamined''.<ref>{{cite book |author=Levin, Saul |author-link= |title=The Linear B Decipherment Controversy Re-examined |publisher=[[State University of New York Press]] |year=1964 |oclc=288842}}</ref> Nevertheless, starting from the mid-50s onward the Ventris discovery came to be viewed favourably by scholars, such as professors [[Carl Blegen]] and [[Sterling Dow]], which along with Ventris' 1954 article, resulted to the discovery's wide acceptance.{{Sfn|Tracy|2018|pp=1-16}}