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reference to the discovered Minoan scripts, they were not related to the Egyp-
tian hieroglyphs. However, it should also be noted that the stylized pic-
tures of Minoans that they found were the so-called
Keftiu
or people of
the islands, found on the walls of Egyptian tombs, of
non
-Egyptian type,
with whom the Egyptians both fought and traded. Vases (
rhytons
) were
found in Knossos exactly as depicted in the paintings on Egyptian tombs in
Thebes. The excitement among Egyptologists could be heard round the world.
Linear B was closely related to the writings discov-
ered on Cyprus dating to 2000 BC, known as
Cyproti-
Minoan
. On the other hand, linear A appears on the
Phaistos disk, discussed in Section 1.1. However, as
we have seen, the Phaistos disk appears to be unique.
Linear B consists of ideographs, 87 syllabic letters, nu-
merical symbols, and symbols of weights and measures
(the latter two in the decimal system), with the occa-
sional combination of ideographs and syllabic letters.
Evans did not decipher linear B. It took about half
a century for that to come to fruition, yet linear A
remains a mystery.
Evans received numerous honours for his discover-
ies including a knighthood in 1911. He died in 1941
before seeing the deciphering of the clay tablets that
he brought to light. That would be for another young
man to do.
In 1936, Michael Ventris was in the audience when
Sir Arthur Evans gave a lecture on Minoan writings.
Ventris was then only fourteen, but he developed an
enthusiasm for the challenge posed by the undeci-
phered Minoan script, which led him in later life to
contact experts, begin reading, learning, and working as a cryptanalyst would.
By 1952, Ventris, an architect, not an archeologist, had deciphered linear B.
Moreover, he verified that the language was indeed an early Greek dialect. This
demonstrated that during a disputed time period, 1400-1125 BC, the Greek
mainland dominated Crete. Hence, earlier versions of the Late Bronze Age of
the Aegean region had to be rewritten. When the clay tablets were deciphered,
they were found largely to be bureaucratic trivia concerning insignificant busi-
ness transactions. However, the value of the tablets is in that to which their
existence silently attests. They were 400 years older than Homer, and linear B
is the written form of the language spoken at the time of the Trojan War. Fur-
thermore, they help to separate the parts of Homer's writings that are historical
from those embellished for the heights of mythological fame. Ventris' cryptan-
alytic success took us back by more than 700 years from what had previously
been deciphered. Until his success, we only had evidence of Greek writing from
about 750BC. Now we could go back to roughly 1500BC. Moreover, it gives us
a glimpse of Greece in the Bronze Age, and clears up some previously unclear
Figure 1.16:
A
Knossos
symbol:
double axe.
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