47 Highpoint,
                                                                                                                            North Hill,
                                                                                                                            Highgate,
                                                                                                                            LONDON,  N.6.

                                                                                                                            27.IX.52 

Dear Bennett, 
          I’m enclosing a copy (to keep) of the first draft
of an article which John Chadwick and I are trying to get into
JHS for next year. To some extent it’s very experimental, and
our convictions about the conclusions expressed will obviously
be altered by the new Mycenae tablets, which I haven’t seen yet,
and by your own reactions to the suggested line of attack. But
it’s very difficult to keep waiting for one’s own mind to change,
especially with the delays of proper publication. So really my
first and main question is: do you think it’s worth publishing as it stands?
And if by chance our ideas meet here and there, do let me know
where I’ve demonstrably taken the wrong turning.

                      I’ve sent a copy to chadwick for comment and for a
check on the Greek philology and for the closing section; one
to Myres; and one to Furumark, who’s lecturing on Aegean scripts
at Uppsala in the spring and wants to get all the views. Incidentally,
he has accepted the vocabulary in a big way, and has, he tells me in
a long letter, found of a lot of “historical evidence” of his own in the
tablets beyond what can be read into the Vocabulary. He wants to
include them in various archeological papers he’s writing (in
the main stream of his “Mycenaean Pottery” and “Settlement in Ialysos”).
I told him to go to ahead, but to make it clear that we think the whole
decipherment is very shaky, and to take responsibility for anything
he reads into the texts that we don’t.

                      Myres, I gather from Chadwick, who has seen him recently,
thinks that we are “at least on the right lines”, from which I gather
he means that he too now feels the Pylos-Knossos language is Indo-
European. But in letters to me during the last couple of weeks he has
suggested that the time was ripe to bring out again some of the ideas
he dealt with in “Who were the Greeks?”, notably on the subject of the
Pelasgians. He says: “If anyone puts a claim for Pelasgian=Minoan,
I should receive it with cautious concurrence”, probably having
Georgiev and Van Windeken’s Pelasgian in mind. The trouble is that,
though Palesgian is a useful excuse for words which one can’t read as
Greek, the words that apparently do make sense conform the Greek and
contradict the very features which Palesgian is said to typify.

                    Myres says he is “at the moment beset with the proofs
of SM 3”: what on earth is it going to contain? Do you want me to
suggest helping him with the proofs? 

                                                                                               Yours, 

                                                                                                     Michael Ventris