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

                                                                                                                 23 July 1952

Dear Bennett, 
                              I looked in at the Hellenic society today to see
if the secretary of the British School at Athens had any more news
of this summer’s excavations, and she asked my advice about a thing
which is worrying her. Blegen had written to her about your anxiety
not to offend Myres with the revelation of the number of printing
and other errors in Scripta Minoa 2 in your forthcoming review of it.
But I couldn’t really contrubute [sic] much to the discussion except to
agree that your own relations with Myres are presumably good enough
to be able to explain to him by letter what you are doing. I must
say that I’m less concerned with the parts of Myres’ book which merely
involve errors in the numbering of the tablets, and so on, rather
than with errors, in the index and drawings, which give misleading
readings of the sign-groups themselves. And if there is to be any
more printing of Scripta Minoa, in whole or in part, it is essential
that all the corrections you can provide should be included. Unfortunately,
the Oxford University Press are probably rather sick of the
book by now, and it would really be simpler to have a separate commentary
from you to read with the book, rather than try and revise the
letterpress. 
                              I was also told that Myres has a volume 3 of Scripta
Minoa to come, which he is getting the Society of Antiquaries to
publish. What on earth is this going to contain? Anyway, they are
hearing some of the criticism of Scripta Minoa 2, and are anxious
that the proofreading should be carried out better this time. It was
suggested that there might be an offer from one of us to help in the
proofreading. I would be quite willing. 
                              I expect you have news of the digs yourself, but in
case not, I gather the position to date is this: Blegen has discovered
the central part of a large Mycenaean palace at Pylos, with the megaron
and throne, the floor had been laid out in octopus and other designs, but
the whole thing having been rather hard to excavate because of the
lime from a destructive fire about 1200 BC. The first news, I had, 
indirectly from Mrs Blegen, that it was a Minoan palace, was wrong,
and the late date arrived at in 1939 has been confirmed. He has found
400 tablets, in good condition, which are now in the Nat.Arch.Museum,
and which he proposes to spend the summer studying.
                             Wace has found 37 or 39 tablets, some of them quite
big ones, in “Blegen’s house” at Mycenae, which will be moved to Athens
middle of August. There was also news in the “Times” that a plaque
had been found, with an inscription of the “16th century”, but this
sounds garbled. The other tablets, anyway, seem to be about 1200 BC
too.
                             If I get any encouragement from these two parties, I
have half a mind to go out to Athens for a few weeks to have a look
at the new stuff; and if Blegen wants someone to draw the new transcript
out, and you happen to be busy, I would be quite willing to volunteer. 
                             I’m very conscious that there are a number of loose
ends in the ‘vocabulary’ which I sent you: in fact, that though there
are some forms which go very neatly into Greek, there are a devil of
a lot of other forms which just won’t transliterate into anything like
sense. From what you said about -jo-jo - jojo I can see that you have
yourself been alive to many of the features which suggest that
the Pylos tablets are in Greek. And the new finds this year, if they
all as I suspect show the same language, make it very difficult not
to expect Greek, at least at the majority of personal names. What I
shall be very interested to hear from you is whether you can suggest
some way of starting from the same points of departure and arriving
at a more 100% solution. It’s too provoking that the language shows
so many parallels in form to Greek, and yet won’t surrender outright. 
                            During the last weeks I’ve made, through Myres, one recruit
who is, in my present state of doubts, almost embarrassingly enthusiastic.
He is John Chadwick, lecturer in Classical Philology at
Cambridge, and had been working on the Minoan scripts for 6 years
Myres gave him a copy of the latest ‘grid’, and he said that he
found enough Greek to satisfy him that it worked, and to suggest that
the dialect was an early stage of Arcadian. One of the most striking
suggestions he has since made himself is the transliterations of Knossos
52: 

a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja	a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja	Athana potnia	[ Potnia  Athenaie ]
e-nu-wa-Ri-jo	e-nu-wa-Ri-jo	Enualios	
pa-ja-wo	pa-ja-wo	Paiawon	[ Paieon ]
po-se-da----[o?]	po-se-da----	Poseidaon