Linear B Decipherment: The Unsung Heroine Alice Kober and Michael Ventris' Breakthrough

If not for the determination of Alice Kober and Michael Ventris, the ancient Greek script Linear B would likely remain a mystery. While many contributed, Ventris's and Kober's discoveries were pivotal. Linear B, considered the oldest known form of Greek, predates the Greek alphabet by centuries. It is related to Linear A, an older, undeciphered script used by the Minoans, a Bronze-Age power centered on Crete. Initially, Linear B was also thought to represent the Minoan language, but Kober and Ventris established its link to the Mycenaeans, who were present throughout the Peloponnese and Crete. Mycenaean Greek, the earliest known form of the language, was expressed using Linear B. The earliest writing with the script dates to around 1450 BC. Linear B contains eighty-seven syllabic signs, symbols representing sounds, and over a hundred ideographic signs, symbols representing objects, units of measurement, or commodities. These ideographic signs, also referred to as "signifying signs" do not correlate to a phonetic sound but to a word describing an object. Linear B was primarily used in administrative contexts. Archaeological findings from thousands of clay tablets suggest a limited number of authors, approximately forty-five in Pylos and sixty-six in Knossos, indicating a class of scribes in each Mycenaean palace. With the fall of the Mycenaeans during the Bronze Age Collapse, the Linear B script was forgotten. During the subsequent Greek Dark Ages, there is no evidence of writing in the Greek world. Centuries later, unaware of Linear B, ancient Greeks developed the Greek alphabet to write the same language. To date, Linear B is the only one of the Bronze Age Aegean scripts to be deciphered. Michael Ventris, an English architect and self-taught linguist, cracked the code, building upon the work of Alice Kober, a Hungarian-American classicist. Kober, born in New York in 1906, studied Latin and Ancient Greek at Hunter College and later earned a PhD in Classics from Columbia University. She taught at Hunter College and Brooklyn College. From the 1930s, Kober independently studied Linear B, maintaining meticulous records on nearly two hundred thousand note cards and filling over forty notebooks. She developed a system of hand-punched holes to sort data, revealing connections and patterns in the script. Kober was an expert in ancient and modern languages, including Hittite, Old Irish, Akkadian, Sumerian, Basque, Chinese, and Sanskrit. In 1946, Kober received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study Linear B full-time. She met archaeologist John Linton Myres, who granted her access to Linear B inscriptions copied by Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of Knossos. Kober's key contribution was identifying that Linear B represented an inflected language. She died in 1950 at the age of forty-three. After Kober's death, Michael Ventris built upon her work, determining that Linear B was Mycenaean Greek. Ventris, born in 1922, was fascinated with deciphering codes from a young age. He learned languages quickly and studied Ancient Greek and Latin at Stowe School. He became interested in Linear B after hearing Sir Arthur Evans speak in 1936. At eighteen, Ventris published "Introducing the Minoan Language" in the American Journal of Archaeology. In 1942, he joined the Royal Air Force. After the war, he completed his studies as an architect and married Lois, also an architect. Ventris, inspired by Kober's discovery of Linear B's inflected nature, identified patterns in the inscriptions. He deduced that certain symbols represented place names, confirming Crete's integration into Mycenaean civilization during the Late Bronze Age. Ventris' discovery provided a deeper understanding of Mycenaean civilization. Ventris died in a car accident in 1956, shortly before the publication of his book *Documents in Mycenaean Greek*, co-authored with John Chadwick.