TOWER OF BABBLE THREE

 

I believe that Michael Ventris simply dozed off. It was well after one on the morning of 6 September, 1956. Unfortunately,  at the time,  he was driving on the Barnet Bypass, about 20 miles north of London.  His car crossed the center line at high speed and slammed head-on into a truck, parked in a "lay-by" (above) at the side of the opposing lane.  A coroner’s inquest ruled the tragedy was an accident.

Those who submerse themselves in ancient texts often have a reputation for being emotionally unstable. In the 1870's George Smith (above), an assistant at the British museum, was working on translating ancient Assyrian tablets. 

He was the first man in 5,000 years to read the story of the holy man Utnapishtim who survived a great flood by building a boat for his family and animals. Smith was so excited by the discovery of what was clearly an early version of Noah's Ark, that he began rushing about his work room, tearing off his clothing. But despite the legends, he was stopped before he got completely naked, and never made it into the hallway. Insanity, is not the greatest danger to archaeologists. It is being human.

There is no question that Michael George Francis Ventris (above) fit the profile of a person at risk. He was born into a wealthy family  in 1922, but it was also a broken family. His mother, Anna Dorothea Ventris had raised Michael according to strict Jungian principles,  To avoid giving Michael "complexes", Dora avoided physically touching the boy -  not a hug or even a reassuring hand grasp.

The young man (above), a “pleasant and humorous, if solitary boy” showed a talent for languages, being fluent in French, German, Polish, Russian and eventually Swedish,  as well as Latin and ancient Greek,  

He attended exclusive English boarding schools, including the prestigious Stowe School (above) where he studied architecture.

In 1936, at the age of 14, Michael attended a lecture given by then 85 year old Sir Arthur Evans (above), the man who had discovered the royal palace at Minos, Crete, and uncovered thousands of baked clay tablets covered in an unknown language which Evans called Linear B. Michael became obsessed with decoding the mysterious language no one could decipher. Like Evans, he believed the language must be Etruscan.

In 1942 Michael dropped out of college to serve three years as a navigator aboard a Royal Air Force bomber - a service which suffered a 44 ½ % death rate. But Michael survived, and after the war went to work designing cold, functional school buildings. But in his free time he continued trying and failing to read the Linear B texts. Then he decided to try a new approach. 

The late American professor Alice Kober had noticed a number of symbols in Linear B which appeared on tablets discovered on Crete but not found on any uncovered in mainland Greece.  Studying addition Linear B tables discovered in 1951, Michael Ventris made an inspired guess that Alice's symbols might be simply the names of cities on Crete.  What if, he wondered, the first character in a particular triplet was pronounced as “ko”, the next “no” and the last for 'so”? Could it be that simple, that obvious? Knossos? After hundreds of more hours struggling with these, Ventris eventually decoded much of the text and determined that the underlying language of Linear B was not Etruscan at all, but an archaic form of Greek.

In June of 1952, Ventris announced his new translations on a British radio program.  It was an earth shattering discovery, but the announcement went barely noticed. The day before a 25 year old Elizabeth II had been crowned Queen of England, and the same day news broke that New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had scaled the 29,000 foot high Mount Everest. So the great discovery made few headlines.

With the assistance of Cambridge linguist John Chadwick, Ventris assembled an impressive body of evidence supporting his theory. Their historic paper, “Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives,” was published in 1953, followed by an almost universal acceptance of Michael's translations. 

And Alice had been right. All the tablets on Crete were business transactions,  concerning wine, corn and olive oil shipments  - just the sort of information  Arthur Scherbius had designed his Enigma machine to protect.

But there was more to be learned from the tablets themselves. Scratches in the clay  had recorded not only accounts payable, but also the finger and palm prints of the scribes who worked on them. Identifying those fingerprints, scholars now knew there were only 100 scribes writing at Knossos, and another 32 at Pylos. They kept the clay wet, to allow them to add and subtract as amphora were received and emptied. They were never meant to be a permanent record. It was not until the palace libraries of Knossos were burned down in 1375 B.C.E. that records were baked hard and preserved for all time.

Finally, three years before his death, Michael Ventris was hailed a having scaled “the Everest of Greek archeology”.  But it seems the achievement left him with perhaps a most epic case of post-partum depression.  

Where he might have gone after reaching this linguistic summit of Linear B, was to remain a mystery, when, at 34 years of age, returning home after a long days work, he drove into the back of parked truck. His tragic death proved, like the tragic death of Alice Kober before him, that the most important thing about solving great mysteries is not the solutions you find, but the effort you make. 

Utmapsihtim, and King Minos, Arthur Evans and Edmund Hillary, Queen Elizabeth II, Dorothea Ventris, Karl Jung, Alice Kober  and Michael Ventris – we are all fellow travelers, heading to the same destination.  Best celebrate the trip.

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