Which ancient Aegean script did the architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris decipher in 1952, revealing that its underlying language was actually an early form of Greek?
- Linear A
- The Phaistos Disc script
- Cypro-Minoan
- Linear B
Why D? And why not the others?
Correct answer: D. Linear B
Mycenaean palace scribes used this script between roughly 1450 and 1200 BCE to record mundane administrative details such as rations, livestock counts, and inventories of goods on clay tablets, which survived purely by accident because the fires that destroyed the palaces baked the clay hard. Ventris had no university training in the field yet showed the underlying language was an early dialect of Greek, a discovery so surprising that most experts of the time had bet against it, and it pushed the earliest confirmed written Greek back several centuries. The older Cretan script it evolved from remains undeciphered because linguists still cannot identify its underlying language. The single stamped clay disc found at Phaistos likewise remains unread, as does the script used on Cyprus during roughly the same period, since each has too few surviving examples to crack.
Source: Britannica: Linear B; Linear A; Michael Ventris