Besting the many experts with whom he corresponded and shared notes, he announced his decryption of the tablets to great acclaim in 1952.Ĭhronicling the entire Linear B saga from discovery to decipherment, "The Riddle of the Labyrinth," by New York Times reporter Margalit Fox, purports to overturn the accepted version of events and shift the limelight substantially away from Ventris. In a remarkable turn of events, the victor was a talented amateur named Michael Ventris, an architect by profession, who had been fascinated by the puzzle of Linear B since childhood. Some of the finest minds in linguistics, classics, archaeology and other disciplines vied to crack the code of this hitherto unknown script, whose spindly, serpentine characters constituted the earliest example then known of writing in Europe. The race to decipher Linear B-an ancient writing system discovered on a set of clay tablets at Knossos on Crete in 1900-was one of the great intellectual adventure stories of the 20th century.
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