It's really misleading to say "An architect decoded Linear B."
When Michael Ventris was working by himself he published junk. A basically crackpot theory that was immediately debunked that Linear B was Etruscan. Then Ventris worked hard to become an insider.
Many key observations for the decoding were done by someone else, a classicist, Alice Kober, right before her untimely death. She worked for 20 years on Linear B and put down all of the foundations. The fact that Linear B has grammatical roots and suffixes, the language is inflected, has case, gender, etc. Kober was one of the first people to work systematically finding patterns and documenting her methods. The work Ventirs did would have been impossible without Kober's methods: extending her work is what worked and gave Ventris his main idea.
Ventris briefly worked with Kober. It didn't go well. But over time Ventris came to know the key players and to be accepted in the inner circle. One of these players, Emmett Bennett, gave him what Kober did not have: the Pylos tablets. By the time they were published she had died.
Ventris extended Kober's work to the Pylos tablets. Her work focused on systematically analyzing groups of characters. When he looked at the results, he made his first critical observation: some groups were unique to the Knossos tablets and others were unique to the Pylos tablets. What if these are place names?
There aren't that many places to be had on Knossos and he knew the Greek names. So he looked for possible combinations and used them to guide the decoding. He used Kober's work and the place names, along with help from at least Bennett, to build a rough mapping from some signs to sound. And then he made his second critical observation: what if Linear B is Greek? Since the Greek names for places seemed to appear.
Then he could try to decode word after word. And along the way he made his third critical observation: many Myceanean scribes were incredibly sloppy spellers. We can even tell now that some were much better than others, but everything is very messy because even the basic rules of spelling weren't agreed on yet. Not only were characters missing, but a single character could be one of 30+ different syllables at times. Bare statistical methods alone often resulted in a mess because of this.
Only small parts of the text could potentially be decoded at this point. None of the classicists that Ventris normally talked to were convinced.
That's when John Chadwick, a linguist, heard about Ventris and tried his idea out. Chadwick was an expert in very old Greek, 1000 years older than Plato. Chadwick was quickly convinced by Ventris because while the decodings were very poor for someone who knew classical Greek, they made a lot more sense to him. They worked together for several years to fix up the decoding.
An architect did contribute the main idea for the decoding, but an architect that was a connected insider, with a background in Greek and Latin, who had published in the area before, knowledgeable in all of the latest methods, with access to privileged information, in conversation with the experts.
The way you put it, it sounds like some random architect somewhere looked at Linear B, worked hard on their own, and came up with the answer. That's not even remotely true.
> The way you put it, it sounds like some random architect somewhere looked at Linear B, worked hard on their own, and came up with the answer. That's not even remotely true.
But that's true of everything. Newton didn't invent calculus ( neither did leibniz either ). He didn't even understand the idea of a limit. It took contributions of many people over many decades and even centuries to develop the discipline of calculus. Not to mention his ideas came from ancient greeks, et al. The same applies to Einstein and of course the most overrated and misrepresented Turing.
The idea of a lone genius or a singular great man who works by himself to produce something great is a lie. Brady didn't win 7 superbowls by himself, Jobs didn't create the iPhone by himself and Musk really didn't create anything by himself. It's just PR which creates heros out of mere mortals.
> The way you put it, it sounds like some random architect somewhere looked at Linear B, worked hard on their own, and came up with the answer. That's not even remotely true.
Your assumption here is that a normal discoverer works entirely by himself, but the norm has always been that a discovery is the work of multiple people.
When someone says that an architect decoded Linear B he means to say that a non-professional decoded it.
You can't just say: "oh, it's not fair to say that because he was actually really good at it".
Very informative summary. A stupid question follows though, so request your patience. Did Michael Ventris really ask the question 'what if Linear B encoded some form of Greek'? Didn't Alice Kober already ask and answer this question, without seeming to do so. The fact that the underlying language was an inflected one and that it seemed to have singular, dual and plural forms for nouns etc - wasn't that enough? Was it academic carefulness that prevented Kober from proclaiming it was ancient Greek?
Kober was very determined that systematic analysis of the text would eventually work. She rejected the idea that you could just hypothesize what language it was. Because so many people had tried and failed that way.
Maybe at some point she had this idea. But you really must understand how bad of a fit classical Greek, and even the early Greek dialects, really is. Like.. a few words work out here and there. What convinced Chadwick were the place names, some names of Gods, and one particularly long 13 symbol patronymic. But for anything more you had to start adding, removing, reinterpreting characters and assuming that the original text got them wrong.
Also Kobler was missing most of the text since it hadn't been published yet, in her small corpus this would have been ever worse.
Even after people saw the decoding the main sticking point for years was that you need to make so many changes for it to work out in Greek that you're just making up the text. It took decades of work to make the decoding work and many of the decodings Ventris put forward were found to be wrong.
Eventually Kober maybe would have worked with Chadwick or someone similar who knew a more archaic variant or maybe Chadwick himself would have noticed it.
Homeric Greek had only sporadic use of the dual. It was apparently a matter of metrical convenience. Classical Greek had all but lost the use of dual. Dual ws lost in Latin. Whereas in Mycenaean Greek, the dual number was mandatory for both verbs and nouns. Like in Sanskrit. It is well known that Miss Kober traveled at considerable personal expense (?) and effort to travel from New York to New Haven to learn advanced Sanskrit. I feel there is every reason to believe that Miss Kober already guessed Linear B encoded a form of archaic Greek and her triplets more or less spoke to this informed guess. Just my 2c
When Michael Ventris was working by himself he published junk. A basically crackpot theory that was immediately debunked that Linear B was Etruscan. Then Ventris worked hard to become an insider.
Many key observations for the decoding were done by someone else, a classicist, Alice Kober, right before her untimely death. She worked for 20 years on Linear B and put down all of the foundations. The fact that Linear B has grammatical roots and suffixes, the language is inflected, has case, gender, etc. Kober was one of the first people to work systematically finding patterns and documenting her methods. The work Ventirs did would have been impossible without Kober's methods: extending her work is what worked and gave Ventris his main idea.
Ventris briefly worked with Kober. It didn't go well. But over time Ventris came to know the key players and to be accepted in the inner circle. One of these players, Emmett Bennett, gave him what Kober did not have: the Pylos tablets. By the time they were published she had died.
Ventris extended Kober's work to the Pylos tablets. Her work focused on systematically analyzing groups of characters. When he looked at the results, he made his first critical observation: some groups were unique to the Knossos tablets and others were unique to the Pylos tablets. What if these are place names?
There aren't that many places to be had on Knossos and he knew the Greek names. So he looked for possible combinations and used them to guide the decoding. He used Kober's work and the place names, along with help from at least Bennett, to build a rough mapping from some signs to sound. And then he made his second critical observation: what if Linear B is Greek? Since the Greek names for places seemed to appear.
Then he could try to decode word after word. And along the way he made his third critical observation: many Myceanean scribes were incredibly sloppy spellers. We can even tell now that some were much better than others, but everything is very messy because even the basic rules of spelling weren't agreed on yet. Not only were characters missing, but a single character could be one of 30+ different syllables at times. Bare statistical methods alone often resulted in a mess because of this.
Only small parts of the text could potentially be decoded at this point. None of the classicists that Ventris normally talked to were convinced.
That's when John Chadwick, a linguist, heard about Ventris and tried his idea out. Chadwick was an expert in very old Greek, 1000 years older than Plato. Chadwick was quickly convinced by Ventris because while the decodings were very poor for someone who knew classical Greek, they made a lot more sense to him. They worked together for several years to fix up the decoding.
An architect did contribute the main idea for the decoding, but an architect that was a connected insider, with a background in Greek and Latin, who had published in the area before, knowledgeable in all of the latest methods, with access to privileged information, in conversation with the experts.
The way you put it, it sounds like some random architect somewhere looked at Linear B, worked hard on their own, and came up with the answer. That's not even remotely true.