Linear B

I have a love of dead languages, particularly the scripts used to write them – especially when those scripts were seen as a puzzle to be solved. Linear B is one such fascinating script. For those not familiar with it, Linear B is a script used in Mycenaean Greece and on the island of Crete around 1425−1200 BCE. The script took three generations of interesting people (Sir Arthur Evans, Alice Kober, Michael Ventris, among others) over sixty years to decipher.



There were a number of reasons why the script took so long to translate. First was that when it was discovered, no one knew what spoken language matched the written script. Eventually this was discovered to be an ancient form of Greek, but for many years the connection was unknown. This made deciphering it extremely hard, as the translators were groping in the dark.

The second was the script is a mix of a syllabary and ideograms. Ideograms are single images which stand for entire words, while the syllabary is a collection of letters (in this case mostly two-letter consonant/vowel pairs) which are used to build words. Because the written script mixes the characters, a significant number of intact fragments of the script were needed in order to figure out which symbols were ideograms and which were the building blocks of words.

Which brings us to the third reason as to why it took so long to decipher, there just wasn’t the volume of tablets discovered in order to find the patterns. Work couldn’t progress until more tablets were found. And once they were found, then the real work could begin. Alice Kober created a marvelous system using hole punches and index cards, so that she could map where various symbols appeared in words. It was as if she created her own database! She believed that you didn’t need to know the language to decipher to script, you just needed to follow the patterns.

Even today, there are still some symbols which haven’t been fully translated. They are assumed to be ideograms, but not enough information exists (or tablets with the symbols exist) for that to be determined.

While the secret of Linear B has been solved, there are still other scripts out there which haven’t – like it’s parent script Linear A. Not enough fragments exist with Linear A in order to form a base to start to solve it.