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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
It was in July 1952 that Mr Michael Ventris announced his solution of the fifty-year-old puzzle of the Minoan Linear B script. The announcement was at first received with proper scepticism, for many ‘solutions’ had already been published, none of which had proved convincing upon closer inspection. Most of them had been based upon quite inadequate collections of material, for it was not until the spring of 1952 that all the inscriptions in that script then known were published. Mr Ventris' theory, the first to be built upon broad enough foundations, has now withstood more than a year's testing, and its essential correctness has been vindicated by its successful application to new and unpublished material. Mr Ventris has generously made his work available to interested scholars, and an international group is now collaborating with him in pressing forward the decipherment of the tablets along the lines he has laid down. Although much remains to be done, the basis of the solution is no longer in doubt, and we can now offer a preliminary summary of the results of this remarkable discovery.
* A historical account of the decipherment, written by Mr R. D. Barnett, with an illustration of the tablets, was published in the Manchester Guardian, Sept. 30. Ed.
1 A detailed presentation of this theory will be found in Ventris and Chadwick: ‘Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives, Journal of Hellenic Studies LXXIII (1953), pp. 84-103.
2 See Wace : ‘The Discovery of Inscribed Clay Tablets at Mycenae’, ANTIQUITY, June 1953, pp. 84-6.
3 See Bennett, ‘Fractional Quantities in Minoan Book-keeping’, American Journal of Archaeology LIV (1950), pp. 204-22. The ‘wet’ ratios revised in the light of Mycenae Fo 101 (letter 20.6.53).
4 Odyssey, XIX, 188.
5 Photograph in ANTIQUITY, June 1953, p. 85. For permission to illustrate this tablet I am indebted to Professor Wace and to Dr Bennett, whose edition of the Mycenae tablets is appearing in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. The ideogram and numerals filling the break in the last line are my own conjectural restoration ; we now regard the tablet as a nominal roll of bakers.
6 Evans, Scripta Minoa I, pp. 68-77: Daniel, ‘Prolegomena to the Cypro-Minoan Script’, AJA, XLV, 1941, pp. 249-82.
7 The first published in ANTIQUITY, June 1953, pp. 103-4 and Plate IV; the second in Illustrated London News, 5.9.53, p. 342, and again on pp. 233-7 below.
8 Fragmentary records of two non-Greek languages, readable but untranslatable, have been found in the Aegean : (1) Eteocretan, from Praisos in eastern Crete, possibly a survival of the ‘Minoan’ language ; (2) the native idiom of the island of Lemnos, which shows a striking resemblance to Etruscan.
