Lacking the necessary background in Greek philology and linguistics, in July he turned to John Chadwick, a newly-appointed lecturer in classics at the University of Cambridge, for professional support. Chadwick was an outstanding classical scholar who had worked on code-cracking in the Second World War. Many parts of the jigsaw that is the Mycenaean world are still missing — for example the relationships of the various sites with one another.
However, the ways in which Ventris and Chadwick worked across disciplines and specialisms laid the foundations for scholarship that is seeing the pieces come together, one by one. An exhibition displaying some of the unique documents relating to the decipherment of Linear B is on show in the Cast Gallery, Museum of Classical Archaeology, Faculty of Classics, from 13 to 20 October.
Opening times: Monday to Friday, Saturdays in University term time only, No charge for entry. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. Our selection of the week's biggest Cambridge research news and features sent directly to your inbox. Enter your email address, confirm you're happy to receive our emails and then select 'Subscribe'.
I wish to receive a weekly Cambridge research news summary by email. The University of Cambridge will use your email address to send you our weekly research news email. We are committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what information we hold. Please read our email privacy notice for details. About BCE, during or shortly after the period in which Cypro-Minoan was created on Cyprus, the Mycenaeans devised their own script based on the still undeciphered script known today as Linear A , and began using it to create administrative records.
This syllabic script , different from Linear A, and first found in the discovery of Knossos on Crete in , was called Linear B by archaeologist Arthur Evans. During and English architect and classical scholar Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B without the aid of a bilingual document—the use of which was so instrumental in the decipherment of other ancient languages such as Phoenician , Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform script.
The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages , left no evidence of the use of writing. With the collapse of the palatial centers at Knossos and elsewhere—one possible but no longer widely accepted explanation for which was the eruption of the volcano on the island of Thera Santorini —no more monumental stone buildings were built and the practice of wall painting may have ceased. Writing in Linear B also ceased, vital trade links were lost, and towns and villages were abandoned.
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Open Culture openculture. But before she could, she fell ill, suddenly, and died soon after. The cause of her death is not known for sure, but it may well have been a form of cancer. It was , and she was Still, she left behind, in her academic publications, a sturdy bridge for others to cross.
And in , Michael Ventris did. Talking to BBC Radio in the wake of his successful decipherment of Linear B, Ventris said: "It's rather like doing a crossword puzzle on which the positions of the black squares haven't been printed for you.
Ventris - who had been obsessed by cracking Linear B since he was a schoolboy - built on Kober's grids as much as possible, and then added his own brilliance to the mix. He wondered about the repeated groups of symbols identified by Kober as evidence of inflection. What if they stood for the names of towns in Crete? Places names are exactly the kinds of thing you'd expect to crop up all the time, especially on official palace documents.
And place names often don't change much, even after centuries. Ventris examined three Cretan names, including Knossos. In the syllabic form of Linear B it became "ko-no-so".
Kober and Ventris met just once, in Oxford, five years before the decipherment. It's thought there was no love lost between the two. In a lecture after he had cracked Linear B, and before his death, Ventris did however give substantial credit to Kober for her contribution - but this acknowledgement went largely unnoticed.
Kober has tended to be presented as a harsh, suffer-no-fools, kind of character, says Prof Thomas Palaima, head of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory at the University of Texas at Austin, which holds Kober's archives.
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