‘During the last couple of days I have been carrying on with the fantasy I discussed in my last Note; and though it runs completely counter to everything I’ve said in the past, I’m now almost completely convinced that the…tablets are in GREEK’
Michael Ventris in a letter to Sir John Myres, mid-June 1952
We cannot speak of a precise instant of breakthrough when Ventris deciphered Linear B and revealed its secrets – as when Howard Carter’s candle suddenly illuminated Tutankhamun’s concealed tomb. But neither was the crucial insight a long drawn-out process. The key period was undoubtedly two or three weeks in late May and early June 1952. Lois Ventris, Michael’s wife, remembered being woken by him in bed in the Highpoint flat at about 2 a.m. ‘with a long story about place names like Amnisos and symbols for chariots and so on, all of course with illustrations’. In early June, there was another memorable moment. It happened when the Ventrises invited to dinner an architect friend, Michael Smith, and his South African-born wife Prudence, a post-war classics student at Somerville College, Oxford (where she had attended the famous and eccentric lectures of Sir John Myres), who in 1952 was a BBC radio producer. These two knew Ventris as a skilful and hard-working architect when he was at the Ministry of Education, who also had a ‘hobby’, the Minoan scripts, which they regarded as his amusement – ‘rather as, at Somerville, it had seemed rather amusing that the brilliant philosopher Iris Murdoch should be “trying” to write a novel,’ Prudence Smith wrote in a lively memoir finished just before her death in 1999.
That evening, for what seemed to her a very long time, she, her architect husband and Lois Ventris sat chatting on the Breuer furniture in the main room at 47 Highpoint, getting a little hungry and drunk on sherry while waiting for Michael, with Lois apologizing somewhat anxiously for his absence at fairly frequent intervals. He was in the study, she said, and would come out as soon as he could. Eventually, he burst into the room, his normally neat hair ruffled, ‘full of apologies but even more full of excitement’. ‘I know it, I know it. I am certain of it,’ he told them.
After dinner, Michael took Prudence into the study. During the previous year, he had shown her some of the Work Notes as he had written them, and so she was able, to some extent at least, to follow the complicated business of vowel frequencies, syllabic spellings, inflectional endings and cross-references to other ancient languages in other ancient scripts, and the phonetic values set out on the various grids – which she nevertheless found ‘as challenging, in their own way, as the Minoan labyrinth to its victims’. But she hung on listening to him, for even though she knew little about the Ventris methodology, she knew enough Greek not to doubt that if his complex positionings and suppositions were valid, then the revealed language was indeed a form of Greek. ‘[His] work still had a long way to go, but the road he had travelled entirely persuaded me, on that strange evening, of his achievement.’
Within days of the ruined dinner party, Ventris felt confident enough to write to Myres and Bennett – the two leading scholars in Linear B studies. ‘Dear Sir John.… During the last couple of days I have been carrying on with the fantasy I discussed in my last Note [Work Note 20]; and though it runs completely counter to everything I’ve said in the past, I’m now almost completely convinced that the Pylos tablets are in GREEK. It’s a pity there’s not a new language to study, but it looks as if we must go to Linear A for that.’ Then he listed a series of words and phrases with his proposed Greek transliterations and English translations, glossing some of them with explanations, and finished up: ‘It may still be a hallucination, and you may well say that the Knossos forms just don’t fit. But the thing that staggers me is that whenever I go to the Greek dictionary to check a word I seem to have found but which is unfamiliar to me, it generally seems to exist and to make sense.’ To Bennett, the list of words he sent was longer and the explanation extremely terse: ‘I have, I think, great news for you. You must judge for yourself, but I think I’ve deciphered Linear B, and that Knossos and Pylos are both in Greek.’ Apart from a lengthy list of tablet numbers with his transliterations of their inscriptions in Greek, the only other evidence in the letter was a grid dated 18 June 1952, with 10 consonants and 5 vowels labelled with their phonetic values and more than 40 Linear B signs placed on it (see below).
At the same time, Prudence Smith, conscious of having an intellectual scoop on her hands, was persuading her colleagues at the BBC’s highbrow Third Programme that Ventris must give a talk on his discovery. ‘No, I had to tell them, he did not work in a university, or a museum, he happened to be a friend…a young architect. They were sceptical – rightly so, for I too was very young; but they gave in, I suppose, to my fervour.’ She also had to persuade Ventris himself. For if he was wrong, he would not only make a fool of himself (like the Czech scholar Hrozný who had claimed to decipher several undeciphered scripts, including Linear B, in the 1940s), he would also discredit his methodology. But since his whole purpose in circulating the Work Notes to other scholars had been to open up discussion on the Minoan scripts, and since he knew that a scholarly exposition of his Greek theory in a journal might easily take a year or two to develop and publish (if it was accepted at all), Ventris too agreed to the talk.
Ventris’s Mycenaean syllabary, as sent to Emmett Bennett Jr in June 1952, with Bennett’s pencilled emendations.
(From the archives of PASP, Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory, University of Texas at Austin, courtesy Tom Palaima)
‘Deciphering Europe’s earliest scripts’ was broadcast on the BBC on 1 July – astonishingly soon after Ventris’s breakthrough. It is the only recording we have of his voice: urbane, clear, unemotional and precise, as one might expect, but also a curious combination of firmness and diffidence, reflecting the brilliant but still unproven nature of his discovery, and probably betraying something deeper too. In the most quoted passage, Ventris declared: ‘For a long time I, too, thought that Etruscan might afford the clue we were looking for, but during the last few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that the Knossos and Pylos tablets must, after all, be written in Greek – a difficult and archaic Greek, seeing that it is 500 years older than Homer and written in a rather abbreviated form, but Greek nevertheless.’ And this in turn meant, Ventris concluded the broadcast, that the language of the Linear B tablets from Knossos, like those from Pylos on mainland Greece, should no longer be referred to as ‘Minoan’ but as ‘Mycenaean Greek’ – that is, as the language not of Evans’s Minoans but of the mainland Greek civilization based at Mycenae that had preceded the civilization of the classical Greeks.
The talk was a masterly exposition of complex, rarefied material for a non-specialist audience – and also, to quote its producer Prudence Smith, ‘an essay in modesty’ which even managed to preserve the speaker’s ‘rather surprised and grateful air of…a revelation which had somehow or other happened to him.’ Old Myres wrote encouragingly afterwards to Ventris who replied that the ending had to be rewritten four times, ‘starting from a decidedly Etruscan bias!’ The single serious failing (which hardly anyone listening would have noticed) was that he omitted to mention Alice Kober – the scholar whose work had influenced Ventris the most – while he gave credit to many others, including of course Evans, Myres and Bennett. In his moment of triumph, even Michael Ventris was not above the innate human tendency to downplay the contribution of a rival, though in all his subsequent writings he seems to have realized his lack of generosity and given Kober her due.
There can be hardly any doubt that Kober, had she still been living in July 1952, would have treated Ventris’s decipherment with scathing scepticism. Myres, though he may have been positive about the BBC talk, did not endorse Ventris’s chief conclusion, neither did Bennett. Both scholars would take many months to come round to it; a solid consensus in favour of the decipherment would require two or three years to develop; and a few serious scholars would never accept it and would even revile it (as we shall see). Something similar happened with Champollion’s decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1823, which was not fully accepted until the 1860s; and again, in our own time, with the decipherment of Mayan glyphs started in the early 1950s, which was the subject of acrimonious debate for two or three decades and is yet to make it into some reference books.
To persuade the ‘experts’, three fundamental obstacles had somehow to be overcome by Ventris in July 1952, as he moved into the ‘substitution’ phase of the decipherment. First, he had to explain how he had arrived in a logical way at his phonetic values for the Linear B signs. Second, he had to show that ‘Mycenaean’ Greek related to classical Greek in a way that was both internally consistent throughout the Pylos and Knossos tablets and also consistent with the reconstructions of earlier, simpler forms of Greek made by classical philologists according to linguistic ‘laws’ governing sound changes over time and place. Third, he had to show how the many awkward words he had transliterated into forms which were not found in Greek dictionaries, might be interpreted plausibly as Greek.
On the first question, we already know from the previous chapter that Ventris was only partly successful. He could never completely justify his thought processes during the analysis phase of the decipherment, precisely because some of them were not logical but intuitive. Those who supported the decipherment were inclined to overlook this, and to argue that it was not the methods that mattered but the end result: did the phonetic values produce recognizable Greek words? If so, never mind how the values were arrived at – to put the argument baldly. But in dealing with the second and third questions, Ventris would be substantially successful over the next months and years, having taken the help of specialist scholars.
The first thing he did was to draw up a long vocabulary for Mycenaean Greek, showing all the words he had been able to interpret, including proper names like Amnisos, Knossos and Pylos. Overleaf is the first page (which does not show any proper names).
The first page of Ventris’s Mycenaean vocabulary list, July 1952.
Let us have a look at a mere five words in his list:
(see pages 24–25). Double consonants are not distinguished; and yet again, ‘s’ is omitted when final.These examples suggest a rather loose way of spelling in Mycenaean Greek, and there are quite a number of other spelling rules that have not yet been mentioned. For instance, the script does not distinguish p and b (in addition to ph) – thus the two signs which were read pa-te in number 7 above could also theoretically be read pha-te and ba-te. A second rule concerns diphthongs, where the second component is in some cases indicated (as in ai, eu, ou) and in other cases generally omitted (as in a(i), e(i), o(i), u(i)), except before another vowel (e.g. classical Greek ‘-aios’) and in the initial sign ai. A third rule is the glide that intervenes in pronunciation between an i and a following vowel, which is generally indicated in Mycenaean by ‘j’ – hence Kober’s ‘triplet’ (page 69) A-mi-ni-so (Amnisos)/A-mi-ni-si-jo (Amnisian men)/A-mi-ni-si-ja (Amnisian women) – which in classical Greek would be written without the ‘j’ and pronounced with a glide: Amnisos/Amnisioi/Amnisiai.
This quick tour of the spelling rules is intended mainly to show what Ventris was up against, without confusing the reader with too much tricky detail. It is not necessary to understand the Mycenaean spelling rules to grasp Ventris’s achievement, but we need to realize that the looseness of the rules made the decipherment an easy target for unsympathetic critics, especially in its early stages when the rules had not been fully formulated. Yet as Ventris and Chadwick pointed out in their first joint writing, ‘If the language is Greek, we are seeing it at a stage 1000 years older than Plato (a difference in date as great as between Beowulf and Shakespeare), and separated from the classical idiom by a Dark Age. It is set in a different environment, and surrounded, possibly closely intermingled, with barbarian languages spoken by peoples of equal or superior culture. Some elements of the vocabulary may be either “Aegean”, or distorted by non-Greek scribes, or part of an older stratum of Greek unfamilar to classical philology.’
It is at this point, in mid-July 1952, that John Chadwick enters the Linear B story as a contributor to the decipherment. From his specialized knowledge of archaic Greek dialects, his wider interest in languages and his experience of wartime code-breaking, he would now help Ventris sort out, with admirable clarity, what was and what was not reasonable in interpreting the Mycenaean word formations tumbling out of the tablets.
Chadwick had recently been appointed as a junior lecturer in classical philology at Cambridge University, but he had yet to move to Cambridge and was still living in Oxford where he worked on the Oxford Latin Dictionary. (Before that, he had studied classics at Cambridge and served during the war at Bletchley Park, specializing in the translation of decrypted Japanese naval messages sent to Tokyo from Berlin.) For some time, he had been toying with Linear B, without making any progress, and without any knowledge of Ventris and his Work Notes, to his later chagrin. So when he heard the BBC broadcast on 1 July, he immediately contacted Myres, copied down the proposed phonetic values from the latest grid and began to apply them to the published tablets. Within a few days, despite the old man’s scepticism and his own instinctive cautiousness, Chadwick was an enthusiastic and confident convert. He was the first scholar to be won over by the decipherment, because he had the philological training to make sense of the results, which was not true of Bennett or Myres. On 9 July, he told the latter bluntly: ‘I think we must accept the fact that a new chapter in Greek history, philology and epigraphy is about to be written.’
A slightly grudging Myres gave Ventris Chadwick’s address and vice versa, and during July, a correspondence rapidly got going between them. A few excerpts are worth quoting for their flavour of what Chadwick would later call ‘very fruitful cooperation’ – ‘group working’ under another name – reminiscent of his own analogy with Holmes and Watson, mentioned in the Introduction.
Ventris wrote first, on 9 July, enclosing some notes, ‘as I gather you have been working for some time on the same problem.… If you find any points of contact between your work and mine it would be very interesting to have the opportunity of exchanging views.’
Chadwick, replying on 13 July, opened by offering his congratulations on ‘having solved the Minoan problem; it is a magnificent achievement and you are yet only at the beginning of your triumph.’ He concluded: ‘If there is anything a mere philologist can do, please let me know. I shall go ahead trying to unravel the tablets on the basis of your solution, and will let you know if I find anything helpful.’
Ventris responded by return at length: ‘Frankly at the moment I feel rather in need of moral support. The whole issue is getting to the stage where a lot of people will be looking at it very sceptically, and I am conscious there’s a lot which so far can’t be very satisfactorily explained. There’s a kind of central area of sense, but still a great periphery which is baffling…I’ve been feeling the need of a “mere philologist” to keep me on the right lines.… It would be extremely useful to me if I could count on your help, not only in trying to make sense of the material, but also in drawing the conclusions about the [word] formations in terms of dialect and stage of development. I sounded JHS [the Journal of Hellenic Studies], who had asked me to review Scripta Minoa, if they would have room for an article on “Mycenaean Greek” in next year’s number, for which the MS would be in by the end of November.… If they do, and if the vocabulary can be solidified some more by then, then would you be willing to collaborate in this article?’ In a PS, Ventris added that he was worried by the absence of the definite article (present in classical Greek) in Mycenaean Greek.
Chadwick wrote back on 17 July: ‘I am not surprised you are meeting with some resistance; the idea is too staggering to swallow at once.… [But] being a philologist I am not in the least worried by inexplicable words, as there are plenty in much later inscriptions, or by curious spellings and survivals. A further point is that I am familiar with Japanese, which uses to supplement the Chinese ideograms [logograms] a syllabary very similar in form to the Cypriot, and of course lacking signs for L: e.g. Apollo appears as a-po-ro.… The definite article ought not to be present, as it is not yet fully developed in Homer… I should have been much more worried if you had found an article.’ He welcomed the chance to collaborate.
On 21 July, Ventris told Chadwick: ‘I see that you will be a very valuable ally’. He enclosed a set of Work Notes with a frank appraisal of their successes and failures. Replying on 25 July, Chadwick worried about infringing Ventris’s copyright, so to speak, by showing his grid to other scholars. But Ventris unsurprisingly encouraged him on 28 July: ‘I don’t feel very strong copyright in the suggested solution, because every other day I get so doubtful about the whole thing that I’d almost rather it was someone else’s. In fact, I’d like as many people as possible to be thinking about the problem on these lines, as there are so many loose ends still dangling: and if I come to write up some of the approach in an article, it will be useful to have had as much informed comment as possible beforehand.’
His diffidence was not false modesty; he really felt it. His letters to Myres and Bennett at this time are riddled with the same doubt. No wonder he was tickled to read a news report about Charlie Chaplin’s controversial return to London from America, which he passed on without comment to Myres. Asked by a reporter about his next film, Chaplin said: ‘I intend to make a picture about New York. It will be about a Displaced Person arriving in the New World. He will be suffering from a head wound which has given him the complaint called cryptosthenia, whereby he speaks in an ancient language. No one can understand him at the immigration barriers, and so he is allowed to pass all the language tests.’ Then Chaplin mimed a scene as he imagined it at the questioning point and said: ‘Effelequesta’ – ‘They think that’s Greek.’
Ventris was sharply conscious that he himself was some sort of alien arriving in the world of academe speaking a possibly imaginary language that purported to be Greek. With this feeling at the forefront of his mind, over the summer of 1952 he wrote the first draft of what would become one of the most important (and best-selling) papers ever published by the venerable Journal of Hellenic Studies, cautiously entitled ‘Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean archives’.
In late September, he sent it to Chadwick with the comment: ‘the first duty seems to be to supply the reasoning behind the interpretation, and the kind of popularization which tries to draw historical conclusions from the material can only come after.’ In other words, the justification of the decipherment must be the main purpose of the article, not a discussion of what the tablets might tell the world about more glamorous subjects such as King Minos, Homer and the Trojan war. The draft also went to Bennett and Myres (its complex signs neatly copied on to carbons by Ventris – no photocopying in 1952!). ‘The introduction has been one of the hardest parts to write, both in giving a fair view of the historical background, and in striking a balance between over-optimism and over-timidity in presenting what we feel is a very considerable body of pro-Greek evidence’, Ventris told Myres. ‘If anything, it will be Chadwick who will be for stating the proposition in more unequivocal terms.’
This last was true, but Chadwick also turned out to be a stern critic of ‘over-optimism’ that might appear to be linguistic legerdemain. Bearing in mind that most JHS readers were knowledgeable only about classical Greek, not the Greek of the earlier dialects, he told Ventris: ‘Half of the article will consist of incomprehensible references and the other half of unwarranted assumptions.’ Soon afterwards, in mid-October, the two men met in Cambridge for the first time to discuss the problem – a meeting followed by a Swissair postcard from Ventris, postmarked Gstaad and purely about Linear B; personal matters would seldom intrude in their correspondence. A second draft by Ventris in early November fared little better with Chadwick: ‘I think a lot of your suggestions are brilliant, and many may well prove right. But I think you are trying to go too far at once; if I may repeat what I said before, one should be cautious but not timid. In particular I feel that one should be very careful to show that proper linguistic laws are in operation, and be wary of varying the rules to suit peculiar cases.’
The impact of all this criticism was to reduce the section on the decipherment itself to less than two pages out of twenty, and instead to focus on giving large amounts of Mycenaean vocabulary, which ordinary classicists would grasp more easily than Ventris’s ‘brilliance’. Having examined these Ventris/Chadwick transliterations/translations of certain sign groups in the tablets, other scholars could then substitute the phonetic values from the grid into Linear B sign groups of their own choosing, and make their own convincing discoveries. Although Chadwick was probably right in his tactical advice to Ventris, it did have the effect (as Chadwick later admitted) of depriving us of a fuller account of the decipherment at the time when this was freshest in Ventris’s mind. In the end, Ventris never wrote such an account.
Of the hundreds of results presented in this article, two were particularly striking. The first was an exceptionally long name containing eight signs, which could be transliterated with the sign list as E-te-wo-ke-re-we-i-jo – an exact fit (according to the spelling rules) with a patronymic derived from the classical Greek name Eteocles in what we know was its ancestral form. Since there are 200,000 million possible permutations of eight syllables, coincidence was ruled out here. The second result was a tablet from Knossos that Ventris later described as ‘the most startling document…for a generation brought up to regard Knossos as the preserve of Evans’s Great Mother Goddess’. It contained four names recognizable as ancient Greek divine names: A-ta-na (Athena), E-nu-wa-ri-jo (Enyalios – Ares), Pa-ja-wo (Homeric Paiēōn – Paian or Apollo) and Po-se-da[-o] (Poseidon). (The square bracket indicates that the tablet is broken here.) ‘I’ve a rooted objection to finding gods’ names on the tablets’, Ventris told Chadwick, because cranky decipherers so often resorted to religion to explain undeciphered scripts (and besides, Ventris was atheistically inclined). The transliteration looked ‘too good to be true’. Agreed about ‘the danger of finding divine names’, replied Chadwick, ‘but if we have them I would much rather have four on one tablet than find them scattered about in unverifiable contexts.’ They eventually accepted that the four Greek gods’ names were genuine, and the tablet probably recorded the dedication of one item of something unknown to each of the four gods (the numeral 1 appeared on the tablet, apparently next to each name).
In late November, the joint article was at last despatched to the journal for typesetting (though it would not appear in print until the late summer of 1953). Ventris thanked Chadwick for making an ‘enormous difference to its value and cogency’. Neither Myres nor Bennett had contributed, despite being invited to do so. ‘It obviously is a bit hard for an old man to be told that Greek has been sitting under his nose for 40–50 years without his suspecting it’, Ventris remarked to Chadwick. To Bennett he wrote: ‘As far as we are concerned the line of attack is common knowledge among our band of sleuths now, and there’s no reason why the discussion shouldn’t be general and battle be joined as from now.’
At this point, near the end of 1952, nothing about the decipherment had appeared in public except the BBC talk, but Ventris was receiving requests for articles, talks and interviews, as was Chadwick. The Times asked Ventris to write a piece, but he declined because he did not want to rehash the BBC talk or anticipate the Journal of Hellenic Studies article, or ‘drag you Siamese-twin fashion into publicity which may be badly timed’, he told Chadwick. Instead, he said, he had given The Times two pages of background and suggested that their New York correspondent try to contact Bennett for an opinion. ‘I wish him luck.’
Bennett offered the following comment: ‘I think there is not yet enough material available to make a deciphering of these tablets certain one way or the other. Michael Ventris’s theory that the language of the Minoan tablets is a very early Greek is a tempting possibility. That is all I would say at this stage.’ To Ventris himself, he wrote ironically, referring to his ‘fine set of cautious, non-committal phrases’. But the truth was – as Bennett knew by now even though he was not ready to say so publicly – that Ventris’s decipherment was correct, and he, Bennett, had missed the Linear B decipherment boat. Both he and Chadwick were equally cautious and excellent scholars, but Chadwick had the major advantage over Bennett of a sound linguistic training in early Greek. Bennett’s disappointment at not having perceived the Greek solution before 1952 was however softened by the transparent originality, brilliance and modesty of Ventris himself; it would have been galling indeed for Bennett if Chadwick, or one of the other European scholars, had beaten him to the solution. He and Ventris would always remain on congenial terms: as personalities, they were actually more simpatico than Ventris and Chadwick – for one thing they shared a sense of humour, which was not Chadwick’s strongest suit.
In Sweden, by contrast, a senior scholar at the University of Uppsala, Arne Furumark, had gone overboard for the decipherment in a major press announcement in November – the first on the Continent. An embarrassed Ventris tried to correct certain enthusiastic misstatements in interviews with the Swedish newspapers, and then passed on the cuttings to Chadwick and Bennett ‘in their awful entirety’ with his own translations for their benefit. ‘How do you come to be so expert in Swedish?’ replied Chadwick. ‘But I have long ceased being surprised at the extent of your knowledge. It’s a great pity you did not choose an academic career; but there are many things to be said against such a life.’
Rather than writing for newspapers, both men preferred to concentrate on persuading academics through private correspondence and talks at universities. In December, Chadwick lectured at Oxford. (‘I looked in to see Sir John Myres.… He thinks you ought to abandon architecture and devote yourself wholly to Mycenaean!’) In early May, Ventris spoke at Cambridge, where he met Chadwick for the second time, and afterwards received some advice from him about a forthcoming talk at Oxford: ‘if I might make a suggestion I feel it would be appropriate…to be a little more definite in asserting the language to be Greek. A proper intellectual humility is a good thing, but (especially at Oxford) it may be mistaken for diffidence.’ Ventris would never be very comfortable in the company of professional classicists.
However, big news that would push the decipherment into the headlines, whether Ventris wanted it there or not, was about to break. During 1952, the American archaeologist Carl Blegen (who had received Ventris’s Work Notes) had resumed his pre-war excavations in the ‘Palace of Nestor’ at Pylos, and the British archaeologist Alan Wace had excavated further at Mycenae. Both men had found fresh Linear B tablets: some 400 at Pylos, and about 40 at Mycenae. In March, Ventris had dinner with Blegen in London to encourage him to reveal what he had found. He reported to Chadwick: ‘on the decipherment problem in general, [Blegen] feels the tablets ought to be in Greek, but proposes to be “neutral” until the decipherers get the answer finally sorted out.’
Two months later, in mid-May, he received a letter from Blegen in Athens. Immediately, instead of writing a letter as usual, Ventris phoned Chadwick at his flat in Cambridge, his voice brimming with excitement – ‘he rarely showed signs of emotion, but for him this was a dramatic moment,’ Chadwick recalled in The Decipherment of Linear B. Blegen had written: ‘Since my return to Greece I have spent much of my time working on the tablets from Pylos, getting them ready to be photographed. I have tried your experimental syllabary on some of them.… Enclosed for your information is a copy of P641, which you may find interesting. It evidently deals with pots, some of three legs, some with four handles, some with three, and others without handles. The first word by your system seems to be ti-ri-po-de and it recurs twice as ti-ri-po (singular?). The four-handled pot is preceded by qe-to-ro-we, the three-handled by ti-ri-wo-we or ti-ri-jo-we, the handleless pot by a-no-we. All this seems too good to be true. Is coincidence excluded? The other words are not so easy to explain.’
Opposite is a photograph of tablet P641, with drawings by Ventris and transliterations into Mycenaean and translations into English by Ventris and Chadwick.
Even to the untrained eye, the match between the three-legged pictogram 
and its accompanying word ti-ri-po (compare ‘tripos’, tripod cauldron, in classical Greek), is impressive. With some knowledge of Greek, the four-handled, three-handled and no-handled goblet pictograms accompanying qe-to-ro-we, ti-ri-jo-we and a-no-we are easily matched with ‘tetra-’ (four in classical Greek, but compare ‘quattuor’ in Latin), ‘tri-’ (three in classical Greek), and ‘an-’ (the negative prefix) – combined with -o-we (‘-oues’, ears/handles, in classical Greek). The words me-zo and me-wi-jo meaning ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ respectively were already known from their use in classifying children into ‘seniors’ and ‘juniors’. Another word, di-pa, had to be the vessel called ‘depas’ mentioned in Homer.
Tablet P641 with Ventris’s own drawings, and transliterations by Ventris and Chadwick.
(Tripods tablet, Pylos, 13th century B.C. Linear B signs drawn by MV, first published in ‘King Nestor’s four-handled cups’, Archaeology, 1954.)
Was it too far-fetched to associate this four-handled goblet in King Nestor’s palace archives with the cup described by Homer in the Iliad, before Nestor sets off for the Trojan war? It was ‘a magnificent cup adorned with golden studs.… It had four handles.… Anyone else would have found it difficult to shift the cup from the table when full, but Nestor, old as he was, could lift it without trouble.’ At any rate, when Ventris published his above drawing of the tablet and its signs, he provocatively entitled his article, ‘King Nestor’s four-handled cups’. (I possess a copy he signed for his former classics master Patrick Hunter, who gave it to me not long before he died.)
Ventris called P641 ‘a sort of Rosetta stone’. Chadwick wrote: ‘I do not see how even the most sceptical can find cause to doubt this.’ Bennett admitted: ‘Looks hard to beat! and I thoroughly understand Blegen’s and your excitement.’ The tablet immediately became the pièce de résistance in all lectures given by Ventris or Chadwick.
On 24 June 1953, Ventris spoke at the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House in London, the very place in which he had first seen a Linear B tablet back in 1936 as a 14-year-old. The following day, The Times carried a report and – a rare honour for a scholarly discovery – also devoted a leader article, ‘On the threshold?’, to the talk. ‘Mr Ventris is scrupulous not to encourage extravagant hopes. Yet imagination cannot restrain itself from speculating on the possible enlargement of our historic horizons if the thalassocrats of three or four thousand years ago should prove able after all to communicate with us in a language that we know.… Shall we some day come upon the relics of that long succession of forgotten poets who must surely have shaped and tuned the sonorous organ of the Greek speech, as it must have been shaped and tuned through many generations to be capable of “the surge and thunder of the Odyssey”? The questions will not be silenced. All we have at present is a dozen doubtful words picked out of some magnate’s household books. But it is the first step that counts.’ Next to the leader was a piece entitled ‘At the summit of Everest’, by its climber Edmund Hillary. The coincidence was too much, and the decipherment was quickly dubbed ‘the Everest of Greek archaeology’ – to the considerable embarrassment of the decipherer.
Chadwick was unable to be there for the talk, so Ventris described to him the enthusiastic reaction, with ‘invidious comparisons to Everest!’ but the Greek ambassador looking ‘extremely somnolent, poor chap.’ The chief critic of the decipherment, Arthur Beattie, professor of Greek at Edinburgh University, attended too. According to Ventris, Beattie ‘swallowed the tripods and went away good-naturedly complaining that “this must be the most irregular writing system on record”.’ (In fact, he would remain virulently critical, as we shall see.) As for the Times leader, Ventris found it a bit ‘fanciful’ for his taste, and for once he regretted that it played down the concrete results: ‘Still it’s a historic page with “The summit of Everest”; and, additional coincidence, the announcement of my sister-in-law’s engagement. All three things we have struggled for for many years!’ (By way of celebrating a whole year of correspondence and collaboration, he now suggested that Chadwick and he move to Christian names and call each other John and Michael.)
Other papers picked up the story. One tabloid commented that Ventris ‘looks as though he would be more at home in a university rowing eight than probing the mystery of an unknown language’, while another had the same impression but preferred a rugger scrum. The Architects’ Journal noted: ‘It was pleasant to discover a Times leader the other day on architect Michael Ventris’s hobby – if that is not too flippant a word – of breaking the Minoan code. On this subject, which has been a world mystery since the time of Sir Arthur Evans, Michael Ventris gave an interesting broadcast last year; but a Times leader being in the nature of a Papal Bull, the last doubt has now been removed.’ Celebrity this was not – even by the pre-television standards of 1953. But the name Michael Ventris was now known not merely to a small group of classical scholars and architects but to hundreds of thousands of educated people in Britain – and soon in the United States and across Europe too.
Yet although Ventris, with Chadwick’s aid, had certainly taken more than the ‘first step’ mentioned by The Times, there were still formidable problems with the decipherment. Even the ‘tripods’ tablet, P641, contained contradictions and mysterious words, some of which scholars are still arguing over today. (We shall scrutinize one of the phrases in the next chapter.) ‘I’m only too conscious that Linear B is only one-quarter deciphered, at best; or that, if technically “deciphered”, we still can’t read the tablets extensively – which from the layman’s point of view isn’t much better’, Ventris confessed to Bennett, appending to his letter a passage about the difficult early days of Champollion’s decipherment taken from the German book on Egyptian hieroglyphs he had read as a young boy. The big task now, as he saw it, was to work with Chadwick and a growing number of others on a thorough-going study of the tablets that would convince even the most sceptical of minds that Linear B really could be read.