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Decipherment
Called the “Everest of Greek archaeology”, the decipherment of Linear B changed forever our understanding of civilisation at the dawn of European history.
Ventris (L) and Chadwick (R)
The achievement was made in 1952 by a young British architect, Michael Ventris. Within weeks of his discovery he was in touch with John Chadwick, a young philologist just appointed to a lectureship at Cambridge. Chadwick was the first scholar to accept the decipherment as correct and in his first letter to Ventris made some further suggestions confirming it (Chadwick was the first person to read the word “Pylos” in Linear B for over 3000 years). Ventris gladly welcomed Chadwick’s contributions and invited him to collaborate on the first scholarly publication, which came out in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1953. Ventris and Chadwick worked closely together for the next four years, until Ventris’s tragic early death in 1956, within weeks of the publication of their monumental joint work, Documents in Mycenaean Greek.
These pages tell how the decipherment was achieved and give a history of it and the major people involved.
Links from this page are organised in four sections. There are biographies of Ventris and Chadwick, a synopsis of the decipherment, and an account of their correspondence, illustrated with letters from the Cambridge archives.
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