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John Chadwick

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The Decipherment of Linear B (Canto Classics) 2nd Edition, Kindle Edition

by John Chadwick (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 78 ratings

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The languages of the ancient world and the mysterious scripts, long undeciphered, in which they were encoded have represented one of the most intriguing problems of classical archaeology in modern times. This celebrated account of the decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris was written by his close collaborator in the momentous discovery. In revealing the secrets of Linear B it offers a valuable survey of late Minoan and Mycenaean archaeology, uncovering fascinating details of the religion and economic history of an ancient civilisation.

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Review of previous edition: '… not only an account of a startling piece of philological and archaeological research, but a simple, moving human story.' The Spectator

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00J8LQYHA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press; 2nd edition (May 15, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 15, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2617 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Up to 4 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 173 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #580,496 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #36 in Greek Language Instruction
- #10,361 in European History (Books)
- #20,498 in World History (Books)

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4.4 78 ratings

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4.4 out of 5

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Socorro

Outstanding review and outlook

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2021

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The bronze age Aegean is an area that was just beginning to be understood and to gain traction in universities while I was a student from the mid 60's and 70's. It captivated my interest at the time, so of course I knew the history of the discoveries, decipherment and ongoing work of those days.

After I closed my own academic career, I followed the topic on a very superficial level. Now returning as a hobbyist, I find this book absolutely wonderful. It presents the process used by Ventris to decipher Mycenean writing and the work that he and the author did to prove his decipherment valid. It includes an overview of the discovery of the Cretan texts around the turn of the 20th century and various early efforts to decipher them. Chadwick gives appropriate credit to those whose contributions were helpful. It moves on to a brief description of the society revealed by the Linear B tablets and closes with an epilogue from 1992 that provides a view of unsolved issues and prospects for future developments.

While using a writing style typical of British academics of the post-war period, Chadwick succeeds in making the topic accessible to the general public by limiting references to scholarly literature and to the texts themselves, but he provides just enough to guide readers who want to dig for more details.

Quite simply, this book is nothing less than a model of decorum, humility and erudition that should be followed all who seek to bring academics to a wider readership. It is superlative in every respect.

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Clyde LeBonz

Excellent Companion to Megalit Fox Book

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2022

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This is the story of the decipherment of "Linear B", an ancient Mediterranean language that defied translation for over fifty years. Other reviews give more detail about this book. Although Chadwick is an good writer, his text is somewhat dense and does not give Prof. Alice Kober her full due in the work of unraveling Linear B, possibly owing to the male-centric attitudes of his day. I strongly urge anyone interested in this topic to read "Riddle of the Labyrinth" by Margalit Fox, whose book is both less dense and more complete than Chadwick's.

Fox's exposition of the Linear B story reads like an excellent detective novel. Although it may be hard to believe it's possible to inject genuine excitement into the topic of decoding a 3,000-year-old dead language, Ms. Fox succeeds brilliantly. Her book should be read, preferably first, as a companion to Chadwick.

4 people found this helpful

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Jonathan

Excellent tale

Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2016

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I've somewhere got the first edition as a book, so I now have the full set. Ok, both. This is ultimately a tale about thinking. The problem of Linear B just happened to be the problem Ventris thought about. It's a tale about how conquering a complex problem can require different minds with different perspectives to open up cracks, and how a step back lets you deliver the final hammer blow to the nut being cracked. It is therefore a tale about how fixation can get you past a step but blind you to where the next step to take is, if you have to turn a corner. It's a tale about forgetting what is wrong, of rejecting the impossible enough times for what is left - however improbable - to be the answer. It's about the mindset that takes, which is not a common one as it requires several unusual things to all be true at the same time and to exactly the right degree. It's also about how perfectly good education doesn't guarantee it, although people with such minds do tend to go deep into education, as is shown in other language breaking cases. And it's about how brilliant minds aren't free from prejudice but are instead made vulnerable to whole new problems by the brilliance itself. I'm sure most people will be familiar with a long line of examples.

This is a book that covers far too many lessons in far too few pages, and is an important read on so many levels because of it.

9 people found this helpful

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Nick

Required Reading for Linear B

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2015

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This book is good because of the detailed explanation, in spite of the fact that the style is a bit archaic - it does not matter, I prefer it that way!

5 people found this helpful

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Karl Janssen

Cracking the ancient Mycenaean code

Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2021

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archaeologists working in Greece discovered a number of clay tablets inscribed with a previously undiscovered system of writing. Caches of these tablets were found primarily at two sites: the Minoan palace of Knossos on the island of Crete, and the Mycenaean city of Pylos on the Greek mainland. Eventually linguists and archaeologists established that the writing dates to around 1450 BC. The script was dubbed Linear B (as opposed to Linear A, an even earlier script). From the 1930s to the 1950s, many philologists tried unsuccessfully to decipher this writing, until British architect Michael Ventris discovered the key to cracking the code. Tragically, Ventris died soon after, in his mid-thirties. In his book The Decipherment of Linear B, first published in 1958, classical linguist John Chadwick, who collaborated with Ventris on the decipherment, tells the story of how this ancient writing system was discovered and decrypted. I am reviewing the Second Edition published in 1967.

When first encountered, any unknown script presents two main problems: First, is it a pictographic, alphabetic, or syllabic script, or a combination of the above? Second, all scripts are meant to represent a spoken language, but to which particular language does this script correspond? In the case of Linear B, it might very well be a language that no longer exists. Egyptian hieroglyphics were deciphered with the help of a bilingual text, the Rosetta Stone, but for Linear B there exists no such bilingual text, so the investigators basically had to start with nothing. Ventris and others began this daunting task by looking for familiar syntactical patterns in the texts and comparing them to languages from roughly the same time period, such as Etruscan, Cypriot, and Hittite. Ventris finally cracked the code when he proved that the characters corresponded to an early form of Greek.

Though Chadwick, along with Ventris, published several articles and books intended for specialists in the field, he states in the introduction to The Decipherment of Linear B that this book is intended for a general reading audience. While this is certainly an authoritatively informative book on its subject, Chadwick is not entirely successful at making this topic accessible to the lay reader. To tackle this book, one not only needs to have an avid interest in the ancient Greek world but also a fairly firm knowledge of linguistics. In explaining the decryption process, Chadwick goes into a level of detail that often surpasses the layman’s comprehension. One editorial choice that really makes this book user-unfriendly is that, due to difficulties in typesetting, the bulk of the text does not reproduce the Mycenaean words in the Linear B script in which they were actually written. Instead, Chadwick uses a system of numerals assigned to each character. Thus, the notation 08-60-02-15-04-13-06 may signify the word for “chariots.” Page after page of these numbers is enough to drive the reader nuts. The volume does, however, include 17 figures that illustrate the actual Linear B characters, including a comprehensive numbered syllabic chart.

The tablets found at Knossos and Pylos were not literature, but rather lists of commodities. Still, as Chadwick interprets them, these tablets reveal a surprising amount of information on ancient Mycenaean life, including governmental administration, taxation and tribute, religious practices, the organization of military units, and ancient armaments. This window into the past is the most fascinating aspect of Chadwick’s book. The process of decipherment itself does not make as captivating a story as the decipherment of the Mayan language, as related by Michael Coe in Breaking the Maya Code, but anyone interested in ancient languages, particularly of Greece, will certainly find much intellectual stimulation in Chadwick’s insider account.

2 people found this helpful

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Markus Kirschbaum

Die Geschichte einer der bedeutendsten wissenschaftlichen Errungenschaften des 20. Jahrhunderts.

Reviewed in Germany on December 5, 2022

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John Chadwick war Mitglied des Teams, welches einem der größten wissenschaftlichen Rätsel auf die Spur kam. Michael Ventris, der geniale Codebrecher, brauchte Chadwicks Expertise in Altgriechisch. Beide arbeiteten an der Entschlüsselung einer bis dahin nicht lesbaren Schrift. Das Ergebnis war nichts geringeres als eine Sensation. Hinter Linear B verbirgt sich die Sprache Homers! Die Verfasser der Zeichenschrift sprachen ein archaisches Griechisch! Und jedem kultivierten Menschen kommt dabei Henry Sumner Maine in den Sinn: „ Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world, wich is not Greek in its origin.“

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Panta Rhei

Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 24, 2021

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Absolutely fascinating. Michael Ventris must have had an extraordinary intellect. Chadwick tells tye tale very well.

Marco Cicero

Una perla ricca di emozioni

Reviewed in Italy on October 1, 2020

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Libro meraviglioso e davvero ricco di dettagli sulla decifrazione della lineare B e sulla vita dei suoi decifratori. Quasi commovente in certe parti, quelle più umane, nelle quali sono descritti lo sforzo e la tenacia che hanno garantito a Chadwick e Ventris imperitura gloria.

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RM

Fascinante

Reviewed in Spain on May 7, 2015

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Simplemente fascinante y narrado de forma muy amena. El único problema es que, si se lee en Kindle, como ha sido mi caso, es un poco engorroso ir y volver a las tablas de símbolos para comprobar lo que se va leyendo.

2 people found this helpful

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Steersman

Somewhat dry classic

Reviewed in Germany on June 14, 2020

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The book provides an insider account of the decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete in the 1950th. The text was written shortly after the endeavor and the rather dry style of that era diminishes a little the excitement of this discovery. Nevertheless, it‘s quite interesting to see the methods and the problem solving approach leading to the breakthrough which are spread out in some detail. Moreover, one has really to admire the meticulous work of the researchers performed without any help of computers.

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