Decipherment of Linear B

Introduction

Linear B is a script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It predated the Greek alphabet by several centuries (ca. 13th but perhaps as early as late 15th century BC) and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization. Most of the tablets inscribed in Linear B were found in Knossos, Cydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae. (Chadwick Pp.65-78)The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages, provides no evidence of the use of writing.

The script appears to be related to Linear A, an undeciphered earlier script used for writing the Minoan language, and the later Cypriot syllabary, which recorded Greek. Linear B consists of around 87 syllabic signs and a large repertory of semantographic signs. These ideograms or "signifying" signs stand for objects or commodities, but do not have phonetic value and are never used as word signs in writing a sentence.

The application of Linear B seems to have been confined to administrative contexts. In all the thousands of tablets, a relatively small number of different "hands" have been detected: 45 in Pylos (west coast of the Peloponnese, in southern Greece) and 66 in Knossos (Crete).[3] From this fact it could be thought that the script was used only by some sort of guild of professional scribes who served the central palaces. Once the palaces were destroyed, the script disappeared (Chadwick Pp.65-78).

Discussion

Linear B has roughly 200 signs, divided into syllabic signs with phonetic values and ideograms with semantic values. The representations and naming of these signs has been standardized by a series of international colloquia starting with the first in Paris in 1956. After the third meeting in 1961 at the Wingspread conference center in Racine, Wisconsin, a standard proposed primarily by Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., became known as the Wingspread Convention, which was adopted by a new organization, the Comité International Permanent des Études Mycéniennes (CIPEM), affiliated in 1970 by the fifth colloquium with UNESCO. Colloquia continue: the 13th is scheduled for 2010 in Paris (Lissner pp.36-42).

Many of the signs are identical or similar to Linear A signs; however, Linear A, which encoded the unknown Minoan language, remains undeciphered and we cannot be sure that similar signs had similar values.

Ventris, Michael (1922-1956)

Michael Ventris was an architect, not a linguist or philologist, by training and usual occupation. He is widely known, however (even outside of the academic world), for a singular linguistic accomplishment, namely, the decipherment of the Mycenaean Linear B script and the determination that the language it encoded was an archaic dialect of Greek (Palmer 87-96). Ventris first heard of the problem of the undeciphered scripts of the Minoan tablets when, in 1936, as a 14-year-old schoolboy, he heard an impromptu remark by 85-year-old Knossos discoverer Arthur Evans at Burlington House in London to the effect that neither he (Evans) nor anyone else could read the writing on the tablets.

The groundwork had been laid for Ventris' work by a number of scholars, including Emmet ...