Linear B and Related Scripts

Reading the Past

by John Chadwick

An introductory guide to the script, its decipherment and its significance.

Genres: History, Language, Linguistics, Nonfiction

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

John Chadwick, FBA was an English linguist and classical scholar who was most notable for the decipherment, with Michael Ventris, of Linear B.

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Chadwick is a collaborator with Michael Ventris, the man who broke the code of the Linear B language from Mycenae. This is a small book, not much more than a pamphlet, about how that problem was solved, and also about the problem that has yet to be solved, the decipherment of Linear A, a Cretan language that apparently predates Linear B. I'm fascinated by problems like this. Whenever I hear of a puzzle that has stumped the world for decades or centuries I perk right up. Anyway, I found this very fascinating, but I'm odd.

[Ευθυμία Δεσποτάκη · Rating 5 out of 5]

Αγαπώ απεριόριστα αυτά τα βιβλία, που περιέχουν τέτοιες γνώσεις. Το συγκεκριμένο μου άνοιξε τα μάτια σε κάμποσα σημεία, εμένα που κοκορεύομαι ότι "τα ξέρω αυτά".

[John Isles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Besides Linear B this book also discusses Linear A, the Cypro-Minoan script, and the Phaistos Disk. I found the account of the decipherment of Linear B hard to follow, especially in the discussion of Knossos tablet Fp1 which is supposed to be a list of various things and the numbers thereof; the illustration doesn't quite match the derived table or support the text, leading me to wonder if something is missing. Incidentally in English we have at least nine different sounds corresponding to the spelling ough, as in plough, lough, hiccough, though, through, thought, borough, tough, and cough (and Wikipedia lists two more less commonly used); not six as stated in Chapter 3. This guide also forms a section of the volume "Reading the Past" which incorporates five other British Museum booklets on early writing in the Western World and Middle East.

[greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this from interlibrary loan by mistake, intending to borrow his longer and more detailed book on the Decipherment of Linear B (1967). This very short summary is, however, lucid, authoritative and includes a well-organized summary of what the author had evidently written at length elsewhere. The combination of ancient comparative language scholarship with cryptographic methods not only provides the basis for a sensible interpretation of Linear B, but extends to a cautious and critical assessment of the interpretation of related scripts that cannot be said to have been deciphered yet. I will keep Decipherment on my list of books to read one day, but have had my initial interest at least partially satisfied.

[Nkavvadias · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little volume I love to come back to from time to time. Written from an esteemed expert and one of the protagonists of the decipherment of Linear B, still the writing style (at least as I accessed it through its Greek translation) was humble and academically honest.

[Mark A.]

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[Ralph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fans of Forbidden Planet and the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man" know that all you have to do with an unknown language is look at it until the translation inspirationally comes to you; fans of Star Trek, on the other hand, know that the entire Galaxy (and beyond) speaks English. In real life, however, "lost" languages yield to translational efforts very slowly, and sometime not at all. In this short overview of scripts from ancient Greece, Crete and Cyprus, scholar John Chadwick reveals the often faltering steps that led to the decipherment of Linear B, the earliest known form of Greek, although, at first, no one knew it was Greek. The first tablets were discovered the late 19th Century at Knossos, the citadel from which the legendary King Minos ruled his maritime empire, as related in the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and Sir Arthur Evans (the discoverer) assumed the language was Minoan; not until the 1950s (long after Evans' death) would it become known that the language was actually Greek. That discovery was made by Michael Ventris, a hobbyist linguist who became fascinated with the mystery when he was 14. Ventris later partnered with Chadwick (author of this book)to prove the Hellenic nature of the script and to produce a syllabary. While Chadwick acknowledges this work, he should have also noted the tragedy of Michael Ventris, that the young man died in an auto accident in 1957, just a couple of weeks before publication of his life's work. Another fact rather glossed over in this text is the fact that all Linear B tablets were preserved by fire; while it's mentioned, the significance is not explained - if it had not been for the destruction of the Minoan and Mycenaean palaces by invaders the tablets would not have been vitrified. In other words, they record not the civilization at its zenith but at the moment of its death. In that light, a document that recorded the establishment and organization of a coastguard service takes on a more ironic (and alarming) significance. In addition to Linear B, other related scripts are examined, but not in any detail, though with enough depth to lead interested readers to other, more exhaustive studies. Chadwick also takes a look at the so-called Phaistos Disk, obligatory in a survey such as this because it was discovered on Crete, even though there is a good possibility that it really has nothing to do with either the Minoans or the Mycenaeans, and may have been imported from elsewhere. The Disk was untranslated at the time of Chadwick's writing, and remains so to this day, despite the claims of scholars and loons, whose "solutions" range from the prosaic (pre-Minoan, Basque & Indus) to the outlandish (Egypt, Atlantis & Mars). Chadwick's own estimation of the Disk concurs with mine, that the Disk will remain undecipherable...one of the reasons Linear B yielded to translation was due to a large number of various documents but, with the Disk, it remains a one-of-a-kind enigma. Though short and in places superficial, this book is great for the historian or budding linguist who needs a starting place from which to launch further investigation.

[Kevin K. Gillette · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of six volumes collectively entitled "Reading The Past." It was my first introduction to Linear B, long before the Internet and Wikipedia.

The depth of intellectual achievement that Michael Ventris evinced with his decipherment is almost without parallel in modern history. That alone makes this volume worth reading.