Book review: the Decipherment of Linear B

By John Chadwick; see Goodreads. At last: a matter of some actual substance. This is a "popular" introduction to the subject, but written by one of those involved, and better still written when "popular" was not debased as it is today¹. I recommend it as a well-written introduction by someone who knows; I shall present it to my daughter for her birthday. Having checked on the Wiki Linear B page, it doesn't seem to be much out of date; perhaps because not much new in the way of tablets have been found since.

I vaguely knew the history of this, but only very vaguely. I learnt that there was a strong academic consensus that Linear B was most definitely not Greek, and in the usual way of things saying - or researching - otherwise was not going to do your academic career any good. Discovering exactly what it was - archaic Greek - depended on starting with a crypto kind of analysis: how many symbols are there, what are their frequencies, and in what positions? This revealed ~90 symbols (excluding the pictograms) which tells you it isn't pictographic (too few, you need thousands) and it isn't alphabetic (too many, you need ~30) and therefore it is syllabic. And the guess, which turns out right, is that there are symbols for vowels, and then symbols for consonant-plus-vowel, and then all the difficulty of how do you deal with successive consonants, and trailing consonants. The initial "key" was thinking that some of the repeatedly seen words were place-names around Knossos. The tablets are initially unfired clay, accidentally preserved by being fired when the palace burnt down. They are a year's administrative records: of chariot wheels, of sheep, of corn, of slaves, and the like. But only one year: the system, as guessed, was that last year's records would be pounded back into clay and re-used: who wants to know how many sheep there were last year? So, no continuous prose, which restricts the kind of guesswork you can do.

I think it is a great thing that our civilisation puts aside resources for activities such as this. It doesn't add anything productive to the world; it doesn't in a way greatly enhance our view of ancient civilisation, because the results are so fragmentary. But in the words of Robert Rathbun Wilson, "It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending".

Notes

1. I recently saw, but to my slight regret did not buy, a hardback of a history of british philosophy from CUP, proudly marked as "Cheap Edition". Who would so label a book nowadays?