"A special handout for the press"- Miss Joyce E. Southan, Librarian of the Joint Library
Gods from Gr and R studies, who sent this copy


THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE MYCENAEAN TABLETS

Synopsis of an illustrated lecture to be given on Wednesday June 24th, 1953 to 
the British School of Archaeology at Athens and the Society for the 
Promotion of Hellenic Studies, by Michael Ventris ARIBA.
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	During the last 2 years the publication of the enigmatic 
inscriptions written in the so-called "Minoan Linear Script B" has 
enabled a serious attempt at decipherment to be made.
	The inscriptions are nearly all on clay tablets and are agreed 
to be nominal rolls of palace employees and lists of food, stores, 
clothes, pottery, armaments etc. Nearly 2000 tablets were found by 
Sir Arthur Evans in 1899-1904 in the ruins of the palace of Knossos 
in Crete (date "late Minoan II", about 1400 BC).
	500 more, in the same script and language, were found by Prof .
Carl W. Blegen of the University of Cincinnati in 1939 at the site
of Pylos, in the south-west corner of the Greek mainland. These date 
from "Mycenaean III", about 1,200 BC.
	Most archaeologists believe that the inhabitants of the Greek 
mainland during the Mycenaean Age (c 1550-1100 BC) already spoke 
Greek, But as the earliest Linear Script B tablets come from Knossoss 
which at that time was thought to be inhabited by a non-Greek "Minoan" 
people, it was often considered that Linear Script B must contain a 
non-Greek language. In that case, the Greeks at Pylos would be using 
this language in the same way that we in the West used Latin in the 
Middle Ages; and the prospect that the language was a completely 
unknown one made decipherment very unpromising,
	The system of writing has about 78 letters. It is not an
alphabet but a syllabary (i.e, each letter stands for a separate syllable, 
and the job of decipherment is to decide with what syllable a given 
letter was pronounced).
	I subjected the tablets to various different kinds of analysis 
(illustrated on the slides), some of them of the statistical kind used 
in code-breaking; and as a result it was possible to deduce something 
of the grammatical structure of the unknown languages and to guess what 
some of the words and sentences might mean.
	About a year ago I began to experiment with a system of syllable 
values which seemed to bring the language Into line with Greek grammar, 
and to produce recognizable Greek words. These values depended partly
on certain key identifications, such as the words for 'Knossos', 'swords', 
'father', 'mother', 'and', 'bronze', ' so much', 'four-legged animals',  
'children' etc. This Greek seemed to be much more archaic than Classical 
Greek, and even than Homer; it resembled a primitive form of the later 
Arcadian dialect of Greek. Compared with the earliest form of Greek 
previously known, it was approximately as Chaucer is to modern English. 
If the Mycenaean tablets are really written in such a Greek language, 
then they represent the earliest articulate record of any language which 
is still spoken today.
	I have been helped in this experiment by John Chadwick, lecturer 
in Classical Philology at Cambridge, and by Professors Gudmund Böjrk and 
Arne Furumark at Uppsala. We have succeeded in working out a possible 
translation of a number of tablets, but are still baffled by a great
number of others. Because the syllabic spelling is so difficult to 
unravel, and because the tablets are so terse and fragmentary, there 
has been a general feeling that our decipherment cannot be definitely 
proved right or wrong. The chief hope of progress lies in the finding 
of new tablets which will confirm the explanations we have already made.
	Last summer Blegen found 400 more tablets at Pylos, and Prof. 
A.J.B. Wace (digging under the auspices of the British School at Athens) 
38 in the 'House of the Oil Merchant' at Mycenae. Both are digging again 
this summer. It will be a little time before the new tablets are made 
available for general study; but Blegen has already found almost certain 
spellings of the Greek words for 'three' and 'four' on one new Pylos 
tablet. It looks increasingly probable that we are on the right general 
lines, even if a great deal of work will be needed to complete the 
decipherment successfully.