Great story. This is the non-technical version, but it is pretty technical. ( )

Fascinating! A brief biography and description of Ventris, a most admirable man; long descriptions of the decipherment process well written for a lay audience, an outline of such inferences regarding Mycenaean economy and culture as may be made from the limited material together with the reflexes of the age detectable in Homer; and a post-script hinting at progress in the succeeding 25 years. Especially interesting for the sketch of the fierceness of academic classics studies in the first half of the 20th c. ( )

Interesting! I knew, vaguely, that someone had figured out how to read the clay tablets found in various areas of Greece and vicinity. This book gives the details. Honestly, it seems to have been as much luck as anything else - why did they assign those particular syllables to those signs, which when combined (and read very carefully) make words that sound like Greek? That aside, the complex process of tying symbols to meanings to syllables is fascinating, if a bit beyond me. The discussion of linguists around the world working on aspects of this (these) question(s) is interesting in itself, as well. Definitely worth reading, though I doubt I'll reread. ( )

Mycenean script shown to be Greek

Slightly dry, but thorough, account of how the "Linear B" language of ancient Crete (and certain parts of nearby Greece proper) was decoded by a part-time linguist, in conjunction with a professor of linguistics. Even though the book is supposedly pitched at a "popular" audience, according to the first chapter, it does get very technical toward the later third of the book, as the author describes the particular methods used to break into the language. David Kahn's account in "The Codebreakers" is somewhat easier to digest, though Kahn had the advantage of writing a decade later. For specialists only, in my view, or those keen on Greek language or history. ( )

If you want to read about the decipherment of Linear B then this book is the motherlode. The author was a Bletchley Park code-breaker who worked with Ventris on the decipherment, so this is a first hand account. The central part of the book where he describes the breakthrough reads almost like a memoir. Some (most) of the linguistics went over my head, but even if the fine detail of the argument is missed you can still follow it and the story.

He also gives an overview of Mycenaean studies pre-decipherment and discusses the implications of what was found written on the tablets. It was still a controversial topic when this book was published and I particularly enjoyed how he would dismiss the opinions of other experts as 'absurd'.

A quick note on editions. There are two, the second being published in 1967 with corrections and a postscript so get that one unless you're a first edition junkie. ( )

Linear B, a mysterious unknown language written almost solely on clay tablets, was first unearthed from palace ruins on Crete during archaological digs in the late 19th Century. This here is the intriguing story of Linear B and its decipherment by Michael Ventris in the 1950s, written by his close collaborator John Chadwick.

We are told how Ventris as a 14-year old school boy first encountered the tablets during a talk at the British Museum by their elderly discoverer Arthur Evans, who had himself dug them up decades before. Becoming hooked on the problem of deciphering them Ventris worked away at this throughout his tragically short life, corresponding with various academic experts in ancient languages from around the world. Many false leads on the decipherment were followed by both Ventris and the international experts prior to the correct solution, with everyone believing it was anything but Greek until it was conclusively proven so.

The difficulty in decipherment lay in the fact that Linear B did not resemble any known alphabet, and still does not. Indeed it was not an alphabet as such, but it was discovered that each character represented a syllable, with around 90 characters making up the complete repertoire. It was also not known which spoken language these unknown syllables represented, and no equivalent of the Rosetta stone existed to make the job easier with the same text written in different languages side by side. Thus the task of decipherment involved a lot of ingenuity, and the special mind of Ventris, who was something of a prodigy with languages from an early age.

When Ventris finally deciphered Linear B, he showed that the syllables made up Greek words, albeit a dialect of Greek older than any known from existing texts. This was a shock, as the Greek language already had a known alphabet, and Linear B bore no resemblance to it – firstly in that each character was a syllable and not an individual consonant or vowel, and secondly that there was no explanation as to why a second way of writing the same spoken language would have come about. Also, the characters in Linear B did not look anything like the characters of the Greek alphabet, so an evolution from one writing system into the other did not seem likely. The explanation seems to be that Linear B was a precursor script to record the same spoken language, which was eventually replaced by the alphabet now known as Greek, which does not share any scriptural relation. The earliest Linear B tablets come from around 1450 BC, which predates the oldest known writing in the ancient Greek alphabet by around 600 years, and Plato by over a millenium.

This is an interesting account for several reasons – it shows the excitement and the actual intellectual process of solving a very difficult problem, and the subject matter is intrinsically interesting from an historical and cultural point of view. I had not previously taken a lot of interest in languages compared to other academic areas, however this book is contagious in its excitement of discovery and the fascination of ancient languages. ( )

What appeared to be a dry read instead brought alive the amzaing personality of Michael Ventris. ( )

I found this book a combination of interesting and frustrating. It was written 56 years ago and shows some signs of aging, but overall I am glad I read it. It has scratched an itch I've had forever about Linear B.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for the obsessive desire and sheer intellect that led to the decipherment. Michael Ventris, the architect whose avocation was archaeology and languages, deciphered Linear B. He died tragically young at the age of 34 in 1956 just a few weeks before publication of his first definitive work, Documents in Mycenaean Greek. This was the scholarly work.

The Decipherment is for lay people. John Chadwick, a collaborator, wrote the Decipherment after Ventris' death. Just think what Ventris could have done in the next decades of his life. The brief glimpses of the thought processes, linguistic dead ends, linguistic jumps, and sheer guesswork he made are stunning.

The one frustrating thing that kept me on edge throughout my reading was something that was probably presented in the book but obliquely - the placement of Linear B in the panoply of languages of the region during that time. I have since gone to other sources online and placed Linear B with Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphics chronologically in my mind, and confirmed my impression that Linear A has not yet been deciphered.

Throughout the book Chadwick gets in licks against archaeologists and linguists whose methodology or bias against the decipherment offends him - either procedurally or emotionally. I liked those parts because they are refreshingly straightforward and NOT politically correct. I also like the parts where Chadwick presents the continuing interest in and collaboration among archaeologists and linguists.

The chapter on Life in Mycenaean Greece was all supposition and what-iffing, presented, to my mind, as simply unproven fact. However, in the 1992 Postscript Chadwick admits that quite a few of the suppositions have been disproved, so I am bit disappointed that so much of what was really biased opinion made it into the book.

But, overall the book was well written and challenging. So glad I read it. ( )

An interesting look at how a writing system was deciphered. ( )

There have been several scientific "detective stories" : the unravelling and discovery of DNA by Crick and Watson; the work that led to Darwin's "Origin Of Species"; the cracking of the "Enigma Code" at Bletchley Park in WWII. This book describes something no less engaging, even though it has much less associated 'glamour' than those others, but also arguably less impact on the academic world too.
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John Chadwick's account of his friend's - the brilliant and gifted Michael Ventris - intuitive leaps that led to the decipherment of the Bronze Age Linear B script (assisted by Chadwick himself), is a highly technical and academic work. Yet it is written so that the lay person can follow the process of thought, the suspicions leading to new intuitions, the underlying assumptions about what Linear B was, and the startling discovery of what it REALLY is.
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If you like a detective story, you are fascinated by scripts and cyphers, or you just enjoy good history well-told, then this is a book for you. ( )

A fascinating account of Michael Ventris's lifelong dedication to solving an academic/linguistic puzzle. ( )

Edition: // Descr: xii, 157 p. : ill., maps 18.5 cm. // Series: Call No. { 913.50 C47 copy #2 } Contains Appendix, Postscript, and Index. // //

Edition: First Edition // Descr: xii, 159 p. : ill., maps 18.5 cm. // Series: Call No. { 913.50 C47 copy #1 } Contains Appendix, Postscript, and Index. // //