I'm continuing my study of Minoan history with this absorbing book of the deciphering of Linear B, the ancient script found in cities across Crete and the Peloponnese.
It tells the story of three people primarily responsible for unraveling the mystery: Sir Arthur Evans, the archaeologist who uncovered Knossos and the bulk of the Linear B tablets; Alice Kober, the almost unknown professor of the classics at Brooklyn College who labored meticulously for years to unravel the earliest, most difficult to find clues; and Michael Ventris, the English architect without a college degree who unlocked the final clues to decipherment.
In another lifetime I think I would like to become a linguist. The study of languages, which runs parallel to my love of history and culture, fascinates me.
The book goes into great detail into each major development in the mystery, which indeed reads like a great detective story.
Fox does a great job explaining complexities in layman's terms. For instance, she sets the foundation by explaining the difference between language (which is a verbal system of communication), and script (which is a written form of communicating language). They are easy to confuse, but indeed quite distinct.
The decipherment of Linear B of course involved the discovery of both: An unknown language, written in an unknown script. It made me think of Hellen Keller and how she learned to communicate without while being both blind and deaf. How do you break through such complexity with such a lack of tools?
As with the Rosetta Stone (which Fox reminds the reader still took more than 25 years to decipher once the Stone was uncovered), the final clues involved proper nouns. In the case of the Rosetta Stone it was the names of Egyptian pharaohs; in the case of Linear B it was place names on Crete, including the name Knossos itself.
And the language of Linear B turned out to be an ancient, pre-Greek.
A fascinating story of some incredibly hard-working, dedicated people.
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