I
Front Matter
Linear B
Mycenaean Greek ledgers — a 50-year puzzle cracked by Ventris in 1952, awakening Bronze Age Greece.
Syllabic script recording the palatial administrative language of Mycenaean Greece (1400–1200 BC). In 1952, amateur Michael Ventris — an architect — deciphered a mystery that had stumped scholars for 50 years. The tablets mostly record warehouse inventories of olive oil, sheep, and grain, vividly documenting Bronze Age Greek economics. The decipherment pushed back the history of Greek civilization by more than 300 years.
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Primary Artifact
Linear B tablet of Pylos
c. 1300 BC · National Archaeological Museum of Athens
Full
Signs
Bottom
— A Mycenaean palace inventory · 13th century BC
When Mycenaean palaces burned, the clay tablets were kiln-fired and preserved. Kober's statistical analysis and Ventris's grid method led to the 1952 decipherment — proving the Homeric heroic age was history, not myth.
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The Letters
Signs · Unicode · TypesSample GlyphsClick to copy
Glyph evolution
Form change over time
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The Decipherment
50 years of mystery (1900–1952)Key scholars
Clay tablets from Knossos (~3,000 tablets)
Arthur Evans1851–1941
British archaeologist. In 1900 he discovered the Minoan civilization and Linear B tablets at Knossos, Crete. For 50 years he insisted "Linear B is not Greek" and rarely released the tablet facsimiles, delaying decipherment.
Alice Kober1906–1950
Classics professor at Brooklyn College. She filled 400,000 index cards to find patterns of word-ending variation, proving Linear B was an inflected language. Died of lung cancer at 43 in 1950 — never seeing the answer — but her grid became the foundation for Ventris's decipherment.
Michael Ventris1922–1956
Amateur linguist trained as an architect. At age 14 (1936) he heard a lecture by Arthur Evans and devoted his life to Linear B. Spoke 6 languages. Cracked the code on 28 June 1952, just before his 30th birthday; announced it on BBC Radio on 1 July. Died in a car accident on 6 September 1956 at age 34 — just three weeks before the publication of "Documents in Mycenaean Greek" co-authored with John Chadwick at Cambridge.
John Chadwick1920–1998
Cambridge classicist who verified Ventris's 1952 decipherment in a month-long examination, then began their collaboration. Co-authored "Documents in Mycenaean Greek" (1956), the standard work on Mycenaean Greek.
Before
In 1900, Arthur Evans excavated Knossos and found thousands of clay tablets. The scholarly consensus held that Linear B recorded a unique Minoan language unrelated to any Indo-European tongue. Professional linguists had made no progress for decades.
Breakthrough
In June 1952, Ventris proposed the language was Greek. Scholars laughed — but the analysis held. Linear B recorded archaic Greek from around 1400 BC.
After
The decipherment pushed back Greek history by over 300 years. Tragically, Ventris died in a car accident at 34, just four years later. Linear A remains undeciphered.
Decoded signs
Glyph → phonetic → meaning
𐀀
𐀁
𐀂
𐀃
𐀄
𐀅
𐀆
𐀇
𐀈
𐀉
𐀊
𐀒
𐀜
𐀰
𐀲
𐀳
𐀏
𐀐
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Reading Mechanics
Direction · Method↔
Direction
Left to Right (LTR)
좌→우 (LTR)
α
System
Syllabary
⌨
Input method
Direct Unicode input
Keyboard layout
Standard IME · input chart
Keyboard layout data not yet available.
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The Lineage
Family · DescendantsPhylogeny
Descendants of hieroglyphs
Phylogeny
Related scripts
Ancestors · Descendants · Family
Same family
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