Michael George Francis Ventris

Michael George Francis Ventris (July 12, 1922 – September 6, 1956) was an English architect and classical scholar who, along with John Chadwick, was responsible for the decipherment of Linear B.

Ventris was educated in Switzerland and at Stowe School. (Stowe is an 18th century country house; by contrast, his mother, Dorothea (Dora) Ventris, lived in Berthold Lubetkin's Highpoint modernist apartments in Highgate). He could speak six European languages and read Latin and classical Greek. He enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1940 and graduated in 1948, after interrupting his training to serve as a navigator in the Royal Air Force. A few years after deciphering Linear B in 1951-1953, Ventris died in a car crash, aged 34.

Linear B

At the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans began excavating Knossos, an ancient city on the island of Crete. In doing so he uncovered a great many clay tablets inscribed with an unknown script. Some were older and were named Linear A. The bulk were of more recent vintage, and were dubbed Linear B. Evans spent the next several decades trying to decipher both, to no avail.

Part of the difficulty stemmed from Evans himself — he had strong opinions about the nature of Cretan civilization and was convinced that Linear B was a language he called "Minoan." A powerful political force in the academic world, he succeeded in cutting off any investigation into the possibility that the language on the tablets was Greek, despite some hints that this was the case.

Ventris' initial theory was that Etruscan and "Minoan" were related and that this might provide a key to decipherment. Although this proved incorrect, it was a link he continued to explore until the early 1950s.

Shortly after Evans died, Alice Kober noted that certain words in Linear B inscriptions had changing word endings — perhaps declensions in the manner of Latin or Greek. Using this clue, Ventris constructed a series of grids associating the symbols on the tablets with consonants and vowels. While which consonants and vowels they were remained mysterious, Ventris learned enough about the structure of the underlying language to begin guessing.

Some Linear B tablets had been discovered on the Greek mainland, and there was reason to believe that some of the chains of symbols he had encountered on the Cretan tablets were names. Noting that certain names appeared only in the Cretan texts, he made the inspired guess that those names applied to cities on the island. This proved to be correct. Armed with the symbols he could decipher from this, Ventris soon unlocked much text and determined that the underlying language of Linear B was in fact Greek. This overturned Evans' theories of Minoan history by establishing that Cretan civilization, at least in the later periods associated with the Linear B tablets, had been part of Mycenean Greece.

See also

• Linear B
• Mycenaean Greece
• Decipherment

Publications

• Ventris, Michael and Chadwick, John (1956). Documents in Mycenaean Greek. Second edition (1974). Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-08558-6. 
• Ventris, Michael (1988). Work notes on Minoan language research and other unedited papers. Edizioni dell'Ateneo 1988 Roma. 

Further reading

• Hatzinikolaou Leonidas (2002). O thaumatourgos psithyros tou Ermi (The miraculous whisper of Hermes). Ellinika Grammata. ISBN 960-406-082-1.  Fiction on the untimely demise of M. Ventris during his effort to decipher Linear A as an Hellenic language

References

• Chadwick, John (1958). The Decipherment of Linear B. Second edition (1990). Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-39830-4. 
• Robinson, Andrew (2002). The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris. Thames & Hudson Ltd. ISBN 0-500-51077-6. 
• Simon Tetlow, Ben Harris, David Roques and A. G. Meredith - Michael Ventris Remembered (Stowe School, 1984)

External links

• Digitized letters of Michael Ventris at PASP.
• Character of Ventris
• A Very English Genius: How Michael Ventris Cracked Linear B - BBC documentary film broadcast 17 August 2005
• The Ventris Papers

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