Linear B

W.G.Ewald

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Riddle of the script: how the world's most difficult puzzle was solved - Telegraph
In June 1952, Ventris, just shy of his 30th birthday, solved the riddle of Linear B. Ventris was an architect who had never been to university. But he had a prodigy's gift for languages and an obsession with the tablets that dated to his youth. Everyone knew that the tablets were the municipal documents of a Bronze Age Cretan kingdom. What if, Ventris wondered, some of the related words in Kober's "triplets" were actually related forms of Cretan place names – forms analogous to English words such as "Britain/Briton/British"?

With this in mind, he began plugging phonetic values into the triplets. One word in particular reared up seductively. Ventris's analysis suggested that the first character stood for the syllable "ko", the next for "no", and the third for "so". "Ko-no-so" recalled a particular place – and not just any place, but Knossos, the chief city of Cretan antiquity.

On the strength of this word, Ventris started plugging sound values into other words on the tablets. They too yielded Cretan place names, spelled syllabically, including "a-mi-ni-so" (Amnisos) and "tu-ri-so" (Tulissos). As predicted, each correct sound value generated new ones in a chain reaction. As Ventris was able to read more and more words on the tablets, the solution massed before his eyes. ..

Linear B recorded a very early Greek dialect – spoken long before Hellenic peoples were known to have existed, 500 years before Homer and seven centuries before the advent of the Greek alphabet.
Linear B - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 

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