Greek before Homer — How Linear B was cracked
(A summary of “The Riddle of the Labyrinth” by Margalit Fox)
Greek 500 years before Homer! And Homer’s tales were told orally for 400 years before being written! It took until after WWII, 50 years after the language was dug up, to be able to read it. Today Linear B is in unicode, and downloadable as a font, a pdf of pronunciations is here.
Given a collection of alien symbols, sometimes appearing consecutively as words, how can you read it? In the case of Linear B these symbols were on clay tablets dug up at Knossos in Crete at the turn of the century, dated to 1400 BC.
Structure of the language by Alice Kober
The first task was to make a table of all unique single characters. This led to the hypothesis of a syllabary (each symbol is a vowel or a consonant-vowel combination) from the number of characters present. The language had too few symbols to be logographic like Chinese, and too many to be alphabetic like English. Working in the mid-century, Alice Kober then made tables of words with the same first character, and tables with the same last character, and sorted each by prefix and suffix. This allowed her to see the word roots and suffixes of the language. Simultaneously Kober saw evidence of an inflected language. Most simply it was observed that the symbol for “total”, known from context of the lists, appeared to have gender (for example for counts of male and female horses). Kober grouped some words into tables where the columns were words with the same prefix of 2–3 symbols and the rows were sorted by the suffixes of 1–2 letters (referred to as Kober’s triplets). She saw evidence of 3 unknown cases, and bridging characters (characters that were neither roots nor suffixes). This suggesting some symbols like the bridges shared consonants or vowels, so she made tables of consonants vs vowels (CV). Her abstract CV tables showed lines of symbols that started with the same consonant but varied in the vowel along rows. She did all this without ever making an assumption of how anything was pronounced, or a link to another language.
We are left to wonder how much further Alice Kober would have gotten with her clean fundamental approach with few assumptions. How much further could the decipherment have gone without a link to another language? Or would Kober’s next step have been to make such an assumptive leap? We will never know, because Kober died soon after these discoveries while still working furiously on the decipherment.
Definitive reading of the language by Michael Ventris
Although a similar language Cypriot was known by many people attempting to decipher Linear B, no one had meaningfully applied it until Michael Ventris soon after Kober’s death. Cypriot is a language that was 1000 years newer than Linear B. It has many symbols similar in appearance to the Linear B symbols, and was deciphered in the 1870s. The Crypriot syllabary was used to write Greek after the Hellenization of Cyprus, and a bilingual inscription of Cypriot and Phoenician led to the decipherment of the Cypriot syllabary. The overlapping characters of Cypriot and Linear B gave Ventris hypotheses for the sounds of the symbols of Linear B. Overlapping is an exaggeration: sometimes the characters were merely visually similar.
The sound correspondence that Ventris thought Cypriot suggested were possible to check with three methods:
1. CV grids like those Kober made: symbols along columns had to start with the same consonant pronunciation
2. Proper names of places/kings (emphasized in the tablets and repeated many times) had to have a pronunciation of a well known word known in history, like Knossos (the first location where Linear B tablets were discovered) and Minos (King where first tablets were discovered)
3. Nouns like “horses”, known from neighboring logograms, had to match the Greek pronunciation
The most definitive verification was a “tripod” tablet that plotted jugs and cups with various amounts of handles and legs. It had both logograms of the objects with a written description. Plugging in the Cypriot inspired syllabary into this tablet and reading the Greek descriptions of “tripod cauldrons of Cretan workmanship” while looking at an image of a three legged cauldron was the definitive evidence that the language had been cracked.
Conclusion
The biggest impression from the book is just how much the computer has changed the world. The scientific community of the mid-century deciphering the language as described in the book appears very different from today’s scientific community. Science is much more analytical today, and much of the painstaking work done by hand of the 1950s has been replaced by milliseconds of cycles on a CPU.
As Fox describes, much of the groundwork for cracking the language was laid by Kober. What distinguished Kober’s approach from her contemporaries is how modern and scientific she was. Many, Ventris included, had the strategy of picking an already known language, and making up a theory of pronounciation until they could read that language in the tablets without too many errors. For Ventris, before deciding the tablets were Greek, he was convinced they were Etruscan but was unable to show it decisively. Other scholars, like Bedřich Hrozný, believed they had already “read” the tablets long before Ventris cracked the code! But their logic convinced few other than themselves. Kober was on the contrary much more modern and analytical, refusing to make assumptions about previous writing systems or pronounciation. In 2020 it is definitely striking to read that other scholars did not share her careful, deliberate, and “from first principles” attitude. Ultimately it is her approach that led to the tooling that verified the Cypriot leap that Ventris tried.
Another striking detail is how much a computer would have helped! There is a lot to be said for optical character recognition from computer vision, which could have accelerated labeling of the characters. But there was a paucity of data in any case: because of standoffishness and wartime and post-war scarcity, difficult travel, and difficult copy-making, the records of Linear B were scattered in small groups, and there was not a big data repository of it waiting to be read. The biggest amount of work was rather sorting the words after they had been copied. Kober spent many consecutive weeks at a time making notecards of various orderings of symbols all to be able to organize and sort the words. It is incredible to think that after an initial transcription of symbols, any sorting methodology of words would take only milliseconds on a modern $100 netbook, while Kober spent tens of weeks cumulatively doing this with great devotion and care.
Margalit Fox’s book tells a great story of the individuals who participated in cracking the code, and there is a great many dramas not mentioned here making up the history of the deciphering. Read the book for more details and excellent images and comparisons with other decipherments and codes!