47 Highpoint, North Hill, Highgate, LONDON N6 9 July 1953 Dear Bennett, As the JHS article won't be out in bulk until September now, you may like to have this advance offprint, rather dog-eared though it is. I'll send you a properly-bound one when the time comes; that will also include an index of Greek (?) words. The article was written last October, and we haven't really made much progress since then, in the absence of new material (except for the TRIPODS). But it will be interesting to see how some of the ideas pan out on the still unseen Pylos tablets. I hope that Figure 1 does not include any major dis- tortions of your signary: not any deliberate ones, anyway. I should perhaps have added a note to explain that the Mycenae column is incomplete: it only contains signs which occur on the tablets of which I have seen photographs. I put the sign of 102.5 in a place where it is rather an embarrassment to me: and I'm not sorry to see it shifted, though I'm not 100% convinced about its new place. It seems to have too decided a twist below the waist to be a "single- stalk" sign: _ or _ ? line or crack? I haven't any modifications to Fig. 2 in mind yet, either, except for Furumark's suggestion (which perhaps has something to it) to move _ to the value s u . He hasn't given me his reasons, but I gather he probably reads _-_-_-_ as _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_, the initials _-_- as _-_-_- , and is influenced by the frequency of _ in front of w- syllables. Do you know Stirling Dow at Harvard? He wrote to me asking for some help in the way of bibliography and offprints for a review of the Minoan scripts (more from the historical than the linguistic angle) which he has nearly finished for AJA. We are approaching the ordeal of moving ourselves and our belongings over to the new house we are building in the neighbourhood. I expect that will be around the end of August. I will send you a card with our new address when it really happens. Yours, Michael Ventris