Mr. G's Lit Blog

Friday, November 28, 2008

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The Mystery of Linear B By Danny Greenberg

In the late 19th and 20th centuries, an archeologist named Sir Arthur Evans found strange tablets while digging in the ruins of Knossos. The tablets were made out of clay, and there were clearly two different styles of writing on some of them. Because of their discovery they separated them in to two categories: Linear A and Linear B. Evans devoted his whole career to discovering these tablets, and because of what he found, he created the concept of Minoan civilization.

Although Evans found these remarkable tablets, nobody could understand them. Many archeologists tried to decipher the writing on them, but none of them succeeded. Then in 1936 a boy named Michael Ventris was listening to a lecture on the Minoans. He was very fascinated by them, but as he was leaving the lecture, the only thing on his mind was, “what exactly did the Minoans write on the tablets?” After the lecture he promised that one day he would solve the mystery and crack the code of the tablets.

Sure enough, after World War II, Ventris became an architect and a detective. Michael Ventris and a man named John Chadwick started to study the mysterious tablets. They noticed that the writing on the tablets looked a lot like Greek. They started to translate the symbols, and it worked. They were able to translate more and more of the different words, until they had a full tablet deciphered. Together, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick had uncovered the mystery of Linear B in 1952. Michael Ventris had fulfilled his promise that he made in 1936.

Scientists all around the world were amazed by this discovery. Eventually all of the Linear B tablets were translated. They ended up listing information on names, numbers of soldiers, taxes, lists of gods and they even mentioned information on cows. Although all of the Linear B tablets were discovered, Linear A tablets are still a huge mystery. There have been many theories of decipherment for them, but none of them have fully worked. The work that Ventris and Chadwick did has hugely helped to improve our knowledge on Ancient Greece.

Danny Greenberg 7A

These are some of the symbols on Linear B tablets.