The race to decode a mysterious language - Susan Lupack

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In the early 1900s, archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans uncovered nearly 3,000 tablets inscribed with strange symbols. He thought the script, dubbed Linear B, represented the Minoan language, while others came up with their own theories. Was it the lost language of the Etruscans? Or an early form of Basque? Its meaning would elude scholars for 50 years. Susan Lupack deciphers the mysterious inscriptions.

Lesson by Susan Lupack, directed by Movult.

In the early 1900s on the island of Crete,

British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans
uncovered nearly three thousand tablets

inscribed with strange symbols.

He thought these symbols represented
the language spoken

by Europe’s oldest civilization.

Their meaning would elude scholars
for 50 years.

Evans discovered these tablets
amid the colorful frescoes

and maze-like hallways
of the palace of Knossos.

He called the civilization Minoan—

after the mythical Cretan ruler,
King Minos.

He thought the script, dubbed Linear B,
represented the Minoan language,

and scholars all over the world
came up with their own theories.

Was it the lost language of the Etruscans?

Or perhaps it represented
an early form of Basque?

The mystery intensified because Evans
guarded the tablets closely––

only 200 of the inscriptions
were published during his lifetime––

but he couldn’t decipher the script.

However, he did make
two accurate observations:

the tablets were administrative records,
and the script was a syllabary,

where each symbol represented
both a consonant and a vowel,

mixed with characters
that each represented a whole word.

Evans worked on Linear B for three decades
before a scholar from Brooklyn, New York,

named Alice Kober
set out to solve the mystery.

Kober was a professor
of Classics at Brooklyn College

when few women held such positions.

To help in her quest, she taught herself
many languages––

knowledge she knew she would need
to decipher Linear B.

For the next two decades,
she analyzed the symbols.

Working from the few
available inscriptions,

she recorded how often
each symbol appeared.

Then she recorded how frequently
each symbol appeared next to another.

She stored her findings on scrap paper
in cigarette cartons

because writing supplies were scarce
during the Second World War.

By analyzing these frequencies,

she discovered that Linear B
relied on word endings

to give its sentences grammar.

From this she began to build a chart
of the relations between the signs,

coming closer than anyone before
to deciphering Linear B.

But she died, probably of cancer,
in 1950 at the age of 43.

While Kober was analyzing
the Knossos tablets,

an architect named Michael Ventris
was also working to crack Linear B.

He had become obsessed with Linear B
as a schoolboy after hearing Evans speak.

He even worked on deciphering
the script while serving in World War II.

After the war, Ventris
built on Kober’s grid

using a newly published cache
of Linear B inscriptions

excavated from a different archeological
site called Pylos, on mainland Greece.

His real breakthrough came
when he compared the tablets from Pylos

with those from Knossos

and saw that certain words appeared on
tablets from one site but not the other.

He wondered if those words represented
the names of places

specific to each location.

He knew that over centuries, place names
tend to remain constant,

and decided to compare Linear B

to an ancient syllabary
from the island of Cyprus.

The Cypriot script was used
hundreds of years after Linear B,

but some of the symbols were similar—

he wondered if the sounds
would be similar, too.

When Ventris plugged some of the sounds
of the Cypriot syllabary

into the Linear B inscriptions,

he came up with the word Knossos,

the name of the city where Evans
had discovered his tablets.

In a domino effect,
Ventris unraveled Linear B,

with each word revealing more clearly
that the language of Linear B

was not Minoan, but Greek.

Ventris died in a car crash four years
later, at the age of 34.

But his discovery rewrote
a chapter of history.

Evans had insisted that the Minoans
conquered the mainland Greeks,

and that was why examples of Linear B
were found on the mainland.

But the discovery that Linear B
represented Greek, and not Minoan,

showed that the opposite had happened:

mainland Greeks invaded Crete and adopted
the Minoan script for their own language.

But the story isn’t over yet.

The actual language of the Minoans,

represented by another script
called Linear A,

has yet to be deciphered.

It remains a mystery—
at least for now.