The story of the discovery of the palace of Knossos
The story of the discovery of the Palace of Knossos in Crete is linked to the name of archaeologist Arthur John Evans (1851-1941).
During excavations at the turn of the century, the British scholar unearthed three types of documents. There were firstly medallions and clay tablets decorated with pictographic symbols vaguely reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Then came engravings placed on an imaginary line drawn from left to right, in a language Evans called "linear A." And finally there were numerous remnants of documents written in a different script, "linear B," which corresponded to the last phase of the building's construction.
For many years Linear B remained a mystery. Decisive for its decipherment was the discovery of documents written in this language also in Greece, in the ruins of ancient Pylos, already mentioned by Homer. Had Crete colonized Greece linguistically, or had the opposite happened? The eighty or so signs of Linear B were too few for an ideographic script, such as Egyptian hieroglyphic or cuneiform, and too many for an alphabetic script. The mysterious language therefore had to be based on a syllabic system.
The young English architect Michael Ventris had the perseverance to study a large number of tablets and make careful statistical analyses of the frequency of signs to derive their grammatical meaning. On the strength of his experience in decoding German secret codes, accumulated during the war, he gradually succeeded in determining the sound of certain syllabograms from the names of places such as Amnissus and Knossos. Then he recognized some words closely related to Greek and began to follow the new trail. It was to prove the right way: more and more Greek words were emerging from the tablets of Knossos and Pylos. So finally, in the 1950s, Michael Ventris was able to prove that Linear B is a language that predates Classical Greek. In the following decades, discoveries of new documents written in this language at Mycenae, Tiryns and Thebes, Greece, would confirm his findings.
