A number of tablets have been quoted or translated in the course of this book; here are a few more samples which will illustrate the nature of these documents. The text is given in Roman transcription of the Linear B; ideograms are represented by English words in small capitals, thus MAN. The details of the interpretation will be found in Documents in Mycenaean Greek, the reference to which will be found after the number of the tablet; PY = Pylos, KN = Knossos.

Following the text is an attempted reconstruction of the actual sound of the words used, as a Mycenaean scribe would have read them. Much in this is of course conjectural, and these transcripts are intended rather to enable those with some knowledge of Greek to see how we extract the meaning from the text. The Greek is written in the Roman alphabet, owing to the difficulty of representing certain of the sounds in the Greek alphabet. It is impossible to give a satisfactory rendering in classical Greek which is not a translation, since some words have different meanings and many have different forms.

The translation given here differs slightly from that printed in Documents, chiefly in suppressing indications of doubt. It must be stressed that in many cases alternative renderings are possible.

The glimpse we have suddenly been given of the account books of a long-forgotten people raises at once hopes that through this means we can now gain an insight into life in the Mycenaean age. Just as the Domesday Book is a vivid social document of life in eleventh-century England, so too the tablets cast fitful beams of light on the domestic institutions of prehistoric Greece. But there is of course a vast difference between these two sources. The Domesday Book is not an isolated document, it can be explained and interpreted by contemporary historical records. In Greece an impenetrable curtain separates the fragmentary tablets from the more complete records of the historical period; during the Dark Age which followed the eclipse of the Mycenaean civilization, the recollection of the former ways of life dimmed to vanishing point or survived, if at all, transmuted and confused in folk-memory.

Thus no apology is necessary if the picture which we attempt to give of Mycenaean life is incomplete, distorted and in many respects conjectural. Further research and discoveries will, it is to be hoped, do much to clarify the details; but we may feel confident that the outlines at least are broadly visible. All the same I feel obliged to protest against the facile guesswork which builds far-reaching hypotheses on slender evidence, and I shall risk trying my readers' patience by indicating from time to time the dangers of going too far beyond the meagre facts.

MAY 1992

For the second edition of this book in 1967 I wrote a short Postscript bringing the story of the decipherment up to date. Now twenty-four years later I have another chance to revise what I wrote then. I shall only attempt to mention a few of the more important developments since the early days of the decipherment.

At the time this book was first published, several attacks on the decipherment had already appeared, and others followed. The critics were in due course answered by the supporters of the decipherment, and this debate had the good effect of clearing up some of the obscurities in the history of the decipherment. For instance, it was suggested that Ventris did not learn of the ‘tripod’ tablet as described above (p. 81), but had already based the decipherment on the words it contains. This calumny was easily refuted by Professor Biegen, for the fragments making up this tablet only came out of the ground in the very weeks when Ventris was writing Work Note 20, and were then unreadable until they had been treated and cleaned; so that even if Ventris had been present at the dig, he could not have obtained the text. The astounding suggestion was then made that Ventris had earlier, by some unspecified means, obtained another tablet with similar contents, which he used and then destroyed; such speculations have done nothing but discredit the authors.

The year 776 B.C. witnessed the first Olympic games, a festival which all the Greeks kept at the precinct of Zeus at Olympia in the north-west of the Peloponnese. Whether it was really the first is doubtful, but it was so reckoned by the later Greeks whose records went back to that date. It is a significant date in Greek history because it marks and symbolizes the adoption in Greece of the Phoenician alphabet, from which ultimately all other alphabets are descended; from the eighth century B.C. onwards the Greeks were a literate people, able to record their own history. Thus Greek history in the strict sense may be said to begin then, and what lies before that date can be termed pre-history. But this was no more the beginning of Greek history than A.D. 1066 was of British. Long before that men and women had lived, fought and died among the mountains and islands of Greece, and by the only test which can properly be applied, that of language, they were as Greek as their successors.

There are three ways of penetrating the fog which blots out the early stages of the development of the Greeks; none of them satisfactory or offering more than scraps of information, but by a cautious synthesis allowing some general conclusions.

First, there is the memory of people and events which survived into a literate era.

The Linear B script is deciphered; what remains? What is the task that Michael Ventris has left to us, his friends and colleagues? There is a great deal still to do, and with the methods he taught us we have high hopes of further, if less spectacular, successes.

The decipherment has already triggered off a fresh series of attacks on the other two unknown scripts of the Aegean world: Linear A, the Cretan script, and Cypro-Minoan, the Bronze Age script of Cyprus. Linear A is obviously a close relative of Linear B, if not its immediate ancestor, so it would appear a reasonable working hypothesis to assume that the values of the signs which are closely similar in the two systems should be approximately the same. This provides a starting-point; but the application of phonetic values does not immediately yield recognizable words. It would be a great stroke of luck if the language proved to be akin to one already known; but failing this, it will be necessary to proceed by the steps laid down by Miss Kober and followed by Ventris: the texts must be analysed, the meanings of words or formulas deduced, the structure of the language worked out, and eventually a grid prepared by which to check the values transferred from Linear B.

The success of any decipherment depends upon the existence and availability of adequate material. How much is needed depends upon the nature of the problem to be solved, the character of the material, and so forth. Thus a short ‘bilingual’ inscription, giving the same text in two languages, may be used as a crib, and may supply enough clues to enable the rest of the material to be interpreted. Where, as in this case, no bilingual exists, a far larger amount of text is required. Moreover, restrictions may be imposed by the type of text available; for instance, the thousands of Etruscan funerary inscriptions known have permitted us to gain only a very limited knowledge of the language, since the same phrases are repeated over and over again.

There are two methods by which one can proceed. One is by a methodical analysis, and this approach will form the subject of the next chapter; the other is by more or less pure guesswork. Intelligent guessing must of course play some part in the first case; but there is a world of difference between a decipherment founded upon a careful internal analysis and one obtained by trial and error. Even this may produce the correct result; but it needs to be confirmed by application to virgin material, since it can gain no probability from its origin. A cool judgement is also needed to discriminate between what a text is likely or unlikely to contain.

Cryptography is a science of deduction and controlled experiment; hypotheses are formed, tested and often discarded. But the residue which passes the test grows and grows until finally there comes a point when the experimenter feels solid ground beneath his feet: his hypotheses cohere, and fragments of sense emerge from their camouflage. The code ‘breaks’. Perhaps this is best defined as the point when the likely leads appear faster than they can be followed up. It is like the initiation of a chain-reaction in atomic physics; once the critical threshold is passed, the reaction propagates itself. Only in the simplest experiments or codes does it complete itself with explosive violence. In the more difficult cases there is much work still to be done, and the small areas of sense, though sure proof of the break, remain for a while isolated; only gradually does the picture become filled out.

In June 1952 Ventris felt that the Linear B script had broken. Admittedly the tentative Greek words suggested in Work Note 20 were too few to carry conviction; in particular they implied an unlikely set of spelling conventions. But as he transcribed more and more texts, so the Greek words began to emerge in greater numbers; new signs could now be identified by recognizing a word in which one sign only was a blank, and this value could then be tested elsewhere. The spelling rules received confirmation, and the pattern of the decipherment became clear.

The decipherment of Linear B was described by Michael Ventris in the first two chapters of our joint book, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge University Press, 1956). This is an attempt to present that story to the general reader, so it omits many of the technical details to be found there; on the other hand, the vital steps in the decipherment are here explained in more detail, and much of the background which is unfamiliar to the general reader is filled in. In particular I have, by the kindness of Mrs Ventris, been able to make use of letters, notes, and other material from Ventris' files. My own file of letters between us, at times two or three a week, has been the chief source for the history of the subject after the first break in 1952. This has allowed me to round out the bare account by the inclusion of personal reminiscences and other details, much indeed that but for the tragic accident of Ventris' death would probably have remained unpublished; for his overwhelming modesty would have prevented me from writing the eulogy which I, and all his colleagues in this field, feel is his due. I had, however, his permission and encouragement to write a book on this subject; I hope it will be a worthy tribute to his memory.

Readers who are familiar with Greek, and even some who are not, may feel inclined to pursue the subject further.

The urge to discover secrets is deeply ingrained in human nature; even the least curious mind is roused by the promise of sharing knowledge withheld from others. Some are fortunate enough to find a job which consists in the solution of mysteries, whether it be the physicist who tracks down a hitherto unknown nuclear particle or the policeman who detects a criminal. But most of us are driven to sublimate this urge by the solving of artificial puzzles devised for our entertainment. Detective stories or crossword puzzles cater for the majority; the solution of secret codes may be the hobby of a few. This is the story of the solving of a genuine mystery which had baffled experts for half a century.

In 1936 a fourteen-year-old schoolboy was among a party who visited Burlington House in London to see an exhibition organized to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the British School of Archaeology at Athens. They heard a lecture by the grand old man of Greek archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans; he told them of his discovery of a long forgotten civilization in the Greek island of Crete, and of the mysterious writing used by this fabulous people of prehistory. In that hour a seed was planted that was dramatically to bear fruit sixteen years later; for this boy was already keenly interested in ancient scripts and languages. At the age of seven he had bought and studied a German book on the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

So far this account of Linear B has deliberately reproduced the chaotic state of our knowledge up to the end of the Second World War. It is now time to give a clear and detailed analysis of the script as it appeared to the investigators who began a fresh attack on it at this period. We must, however, begin with some preliminary observations on the nature of the problem and the methods which can be applied.

There is an obvious resemblance between an unreadable script and a secret code; similar methods can be employed to break both. But the differences must not be overlooked. The code is deliberately designed to baffle the investigator; the script is only puzzling by accident. The language underlying the coded text is ordinarily known; in the case of a script there are three separate possibilities. The language may be known or partially known, but written in an unknown script; this, for instance, was the case with the decipherment of the Old Persian inscriptions by the German scholar Grotefend in 1802; the cuneiform signs were then quite unknown, but the language, as revealed by recognition of proper names, turned out to be largely intelligible through the medium of the Avestan texts. Secondly, the script may be known, the language unknown.