Michael Ventris

Michael Ventris, the architect who deciphered Linear B script. In 1953, a young British architect gave a widely attended lecture at the Society of Antiquaries of London. Michael Ventris’ subject was his recent decipherment of a mysterious ancient script, Minoan Linear B, discovered by Sir Arthur Evans. Its language, he demonstrated, was an archaic dialect of Greek half a millennium older than Homer’s, dating from about 1450 BC – making Linear B the oldest readable writing from Europe. The Times promptly dubbed the decipherment ‘the Everest of Greek archaeology’ – to the considerable embarrassment of Ventris. As a boy, Ventris was far from deeply interested in the classical