Cryptography and the Mycenaean Greeks
A look at cryptography, and its use in deciphering the Linear B script of the Mycenaean Greeks.
When we think of cryptography, more often than not, we think of codebreakers building machines in an attempt to comprehend messages intercepted by spies, in the throes of war, popularized by movies like The Imitation Game. Or, we could take a more 21st century view, and ponder over the ethics of having completely secure cryptosystems, and their use by terrorists, versus the government having access to all our messages and communications.
In all of these situations, there is a person wanting to send a message to another person, without anyone else being able to read it. There is also another person desperately wanting to read these messages, and act based on the information it encodes. At least in most of these situations, their frustration is somewhat alleviated by there being some context to rely on while deciphering these codes. But what if the person sending the messages is no longer alive, and in fact, the messages themselves have been buried for centuries?
In 1886, Arthur Evans, a British archaeologist and keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, came across a seal stone covered with signs that reminded him of the Mycenaean writing uncovered in Crete. He gradually acquired more similar artefacts, and went to Crete himself in search of the script, and published his findings in The Journal of Hellenic Studies.
Gradually, through further excavations, these symbols were classified into two scripts: Linear A and Linear B, differing in their numeric systems and formation of the symbols. There were many attempts at deciphering these scripts, which mainly focused on the underlying language they embodied. There were a few key proponents of the theory that Linear A and Linear B represented different languages, such as American classicists Alice Kober and Emmett L. Bennett Jr.
Kober, assistant professor of classics at Brooklyn College, also discovered that Linear B was an inflected language, which means that words are changed to express differences in tense, gender, case, etc. She was a prolific scholar, and was proficient in languages such as Old Irish, Old Persian, Sanskrit, Sumerian, Chinese, and Akkadian. However, due to her numerous other commitments, including teaching, she remained unable to decipher the script itself and died at the young age of 43, rumored due to stomach cancer. A few years later, the code of Linear B was finally cracked.
When Michael Ventris was a teenager, he attended a talk by Arthur Evans that would go on to change his life, and history, forever. Ventris came from an army background, with his grandfather being the Commander of British Forces in China and his father in the Indian Army. He didn’t do well at school, and devoted all his time to studying Linear B, even staying up late at night reading under his covers with a flashlight. In 1942, he joined the Royal Air Force, and became a navigator. After the war, he remained in Germany, and it is widely assumed that he was involved in code-breaking, though he has repeatedly denied this.
Ventris studied the tablets excavated by Evans, and came across Kober’s work explaining the reasons why she believed Linear B was an inflected language. The words on the tablets could be broken down into roots and suffixes, and also contained bridging syllables that could connect the root and suffix, and belong to both.
The alphabet of English contains 26 letters, and combinations of these letters produce syllables. From the number of symbols an alphabet contains, it is easy to interpret what types of sounds they represent. Chinese has over 100,000 different characters, and is a logographic script, where each character represents a word or a part of a word. Linear B has an alphabet of 90 syllabic signs, with additional ideographic signs which represent things or ideas. This clearly is too large to represent an alphabetic language like English, and too small to be a logographic language like Chinese. Therefore, Kober concluded that it had to be a syllabic language, with symbols representing individual syllables, usually a combination of a vowel and a consonant.
Ventris theorized that certain words appearing in the Crete tablets were names of places, due to them not appearing in other tablets discovered inland. He matched certain words with certain place names, assuming that the language encoded by Linear B was in fact Greek. He developed a syllabic grid, with consonant sounds on one side, and vowel sounds on the other.
He used frequency analysis, a common tool used by cryptographers. Frequency analysis is used to study the distribution of letters in a text, and match the highest occurring letters with sounds that occur commonly in that particular language. For example, in most English texts, the most frequently occurred letter is ‘e’. Ventris used this technique to identify which symbols could possibly represent vowels, without any consonants attached to them. He theorized that these symbols would occur at the beginning of words, rather than in between them. Identifying certain symbols from the names of cities, he filled up his grid with all the information he had, and ultimately proved that Linear B was a script for Greek.
Assisted by John Chadwick, a professor of Ancient Greek philology, he unlocked the meaning behind a huge proportion of the words found on the tablets, and deciphered them. Their work was essential in showcasing the fact that written Greek existed far earlier than previously theorized. Chadwick and Ventris co-authored a book titled Documents in Mycenaean Greek, but sadly Ventris died in an automobile accident before it was published.
Thus, tools and concepts that were mainly used to crack codes in the midst of battle were now being used to understand a script that hadn’t been in use for hundreds of centuries. There was no context, no knowledge of the underlying language, no starting point to work from. The sheer brilliance of these scholars in cracking this indecipherable code has to be applauded, and their work has allowed researchers from diverse fields to learn more about the lives of Myceneans, as well as use their work as an example for cracking numerous other unknown codes.
Linear A, the predecessor of Linear B, still remains unsolved. Scholars think it was used to write a hitherto unknown Minoan language, and only the numbers have been identified, due to its similarities with Linear B. But who knows, maybe something obvious is staring at all of us right in the face, just waiting to be discovered!
The thrill of reading the words of the ancient beings who trespassed the earth years before us, and learning about their thoughts, day-to-day activities, and societal structures, is unparalleled, and progress is being made as we speak. Maybe one day, we’ll be able to read Linear A as well. Here’s hoping that day comes sooner rather than later.
