Linear B

In the 1900s Arthur Evans, was carrying out a dig in Knossos in Crete, and discovered clay tablets with signs scratched on them. These he called Linear B (to distinguish them from an earlier script which he named Linear A), and were not deciphered for more than fifty years.

Linear B remained an enigma until 1952 when it was deciphered by Michael Ventris after many years of effort.

The decipherment of Linear B

The breakthrough for Michael Ventris came when he hypothesised that the language in which the tablets were written was Greek - Ancient Greek predating Homer by five hundred years. Previously, for many years, he had the belief that Linear B was linked to Etruscan, and it was only once he had disregarded this theory that he could complete the decipherment.

Once Ventris had made the inspired guess that Linear B was actually Greek written in a different script, he proceeded with the decipherment by using the archaic names of well-known towns from ancient Crete and matching them with the Kober triplets.

Kober triplets

Alice Koner analysed the Linear B tablets and discovered that some words followed the pattern XYZA, XYZB, XYZC and from this hypothesized that the language was an inflected one (an inflected language is one like Latin or Ancient Greek) which would mean that it would decline.