Michael Ventris's Blueprint: Letters reveal how a British architect and two American scholars worked to decipher a Bronze Age script and read the earliest writings in western civilization

An article written for the 40th anniversary of Michael Ventris' decipherment of Linear B as writing a Bronze Age form of the Greek language. Written for a general audience, it situates Ventris within the scholarly milieu of his times, highlights the work of Alice E. Kober and Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. necessary for Ventris to decipher the script, and characterizes Ventris as a "part-time scholar" using quotations from the young British architect's letters.