![]() ![]() So Sir Arthur gave them the prosaic name of Linear B, to distinguish the writing from a system he called Linear A. The 90 or so symbols on these and other tablets later found elsewhere on Crete and in a few places on the Greek mainland dated to about 1400 B.C., and they bore no resemblance to any known writing system. The mystery began in 1900 when Sir Arthur Evans, a British archeologist excavating the ancient Minoan palace at Knossos, on Crete, discovered clay tablets imprinted with strange pictograms that had been baked kiln-hard and had survived a fire that had destroyed the palace 3,000 years earlier. Ventris, announced that they had unlocked the secrets to a puzzle that had confounded scholars for more than half a century, and even determined that Linear B was a style of Greek used 500 years before the age of Homer. In an era in which astronauts spend weeks in space and sheep are cloned, it is hard to imagine the excitement - or the controversy - the two men created in 1953. Chadwick was 78 and a longtime resident of Cambridge. ![]() ![]() John Chadwick, a self-effacing linguist who played a critical role in deciphering the ancient Greek writings known as Linear B, then spent the rest of his life deflecting credit to his collaborator, died in England on Nov. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |