The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris

This book is about half biography and half story of the decipherment. It is important to know that in case someone wanted a straight forward academic decipherment history. With that said, this is a wonderful and interesting story about a man I knew little about. Seeing how his personality affected his work really drives home both his genius and the luck involved in something like this. I could not put it down once I started reading it.

Linear B was a script of unknown language that appeared in bits and pieces in archaelogical digs in an around Greece. Nobody could decipher it; in fact, they couldn't even agree on what language the script represented. Andrew Robinson tells the fascinating story of Michael Ventris, the architect/amateur linguist who 'cracked' the code of Linear B and proved to the world that it contained an ancient form of Greek.The story unfolds with the same drama as a murder mystery or detective story. Robinson makes what could have been a complicated story eloquent and clear.Although I recommend this book highly, at the end of it I still felt in the dark about Ventris himself. He seems to have been a great eccentric and very private individual. His sudden death at the age of 34 seems to have occurred under a cloud of deep depression that Robinson does not really explain. Linear B may be deciphered, but Ventris is still a mystery.

Andrew Robinson's "The Man Who Deciphered Linear B" should be dry and academic in the worst possible senses of those words. It is, to the contrary, an utterly fascinating mystery and linguistic puzzle which Robinson lays out methodically for his readers--even those who had little previous interest in linguistic puzzles.Michael Ventris, the man at the heart of this book, was a rather shy, somewhat diffident man who had trained as an architect and married young. Instead of leading the staid life it seems fate had laid out for him, he spent most of his short adult years working on the Linear B--a tablet found at a Mediterranean archaeological dig, and a tablet which had all but been pronounced indecipherable by many scholars with better credentials than Ventris's. Ventris ignored their conclusions and did eventually decipher the tablet. The story is filled with surprises and sudden discoveries, with disappointments and fortuitous guesses, and so on. It is quite a ride. There is even the occasional spot of humor--as when Ventris was stopped by a suspicious Customs agent who said, "These Pylos Tablets--exactly what ailment is it that they're supposed to relieve?"I learned a great deal from this book. Among the more memorable nuggets was the fact that an alphabet generally contains between 20 and 40 characters--if there are more than 40 characters, it is probably a syllabary (meaning, a system by which each character represents an entire word rather than just one letter or other element WITHIN a word). I highly recommend this for any student of lost language--and anyone who enjoys a twisty-turny thriller!

One gets to know and understand Michael Ventris in the context of the many social and economic changes that were taking place in England in the years straddling the Second World War. I especially liked how the book highlights the collaborative approach that Michael Ventris adopted to address the problems of deciphering Linear B and his architectural assignments.The book does an wonderful job of explaining with enough detail, but without overwhelming the casual reader, the administrative and intellectual hurdles that Michael Ventris had to overcome to decipher this ancient system of writing.I enjoyed it as a great biography but surprisingly also as a source of ideas on how to approach complex management projects ... it is much more readable than a typical project management book.

Michael Ventris was a brilliant linguist who solved a top-notch archeological puzzle. The extent of his accomplishment and his peculiar and likable personality are well shown in _The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris_ (Thames & Hudson) by Andrew Robinson. Ventris's accomplishment was an intellectual breakthrough ranking with the victory of Champollion over hieroglyphics, and unlike Champollion, he had no Rosetta Stone guide him in translations. His victory was over the squiggles on clay tablets unearthed at Knossos on Crete.Ventris became intrigued by the decipherment as a schoolboy, even furtively studying the language by flashlight under his bedsheets at school. He modestly explained years later, "Some of us thought it would be a change from our set lessons to try and decipher the tablets, but of course we didn' t get anywhere. Somehow I've remained interested in the problem ever since." He did not then, of course, have the academic credentials to tackle such a task, but he never got them. He was a brilliant linguist, picking up languages quickly and speaking like a native, but he had no training in language or the classics; he never even went to university. He trained as an architect, and for all his short life, he split his endeavors between architecture and Linear B. Robinson maintains that the decipherment was helped by Ventris's training in architecture. The book is excellent at showing the difficult assignment Ventris gave himself, using good analogies with English words to make the puzzle as plain as possible for non-linguists. It shows the importance of hunches and inspiration, as well as cold logic. Ventris solved what is probably the greatest challenge in deciphering any ancient language, and though the achievement was magnificent, the fruits were meager: there is no literature in the language, no epic poetry, no sparkling civilization. The tablets are inventories and lists of possessions such as urns and goats.Ventris was a gently humorous but private man who remains an enigma in many ways, and was so to the people who knew him. Having abandoned further work on Linear B, he also abandoned the assignment he was pursuing in architecture at the same time. He died in a car crash at the age of 34. Robinson is full of admiration for Ventris's astonishing accomplishment, and this book shows just how remarkable an achievement it was. It is not only an excellent small biography, but an introduction to a magnificent intellectual triumph.