Linear B Decoded: Mycenaean Secrets Revealed
British archaeologist Arthur Evans uncovered a vast archive of clay tablets at the Palace of Knossos on Crete in 1900, inscribed in a script he designated Linear B. The tablets sat undeciphered for over fifty years until Michael Ventris, a young British architect working without academic credentials, cracked the code in 1952. He demonstrated that Linear B was an early form of Greek, not a separate Minoan language, proving that Greek-speaking Mycenaeans had controlled Knossos centuries before classical Greece. The tablets turned out to be administrative records listing sheep inventories, grain distributions, and chariot parts, revealing a bureaucratic society obsessed with accounting rather than the romantic civilization Evans had imagined.
April 5, 1900
126 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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