Question

Deciphering the Bronze Age

[1]
For decades, the clay tablets unearthed at the ancient palace of Knossos by archaeologist Arthur Evans remained an impenetrable mystery. Written in a script dubbed "Linear B," these inscriptions defied translation, leaving scholars to debate whether the language was Basque, Etruscan, or an early form of Greek. Evans himself fiercely maintained that Linear B could not possibly be Greek, believing it belonged to a distinct Minoan civilization that dominated the Aegean long before the rise of Mycenae. This authoritative stance discouraged many researchers from pursuing Greek linguistic leads, thereby stalling progress for nearly half a century.

[2]
The breakthrough finally came in the early 1950s through the collaborative, yet independent, efforts of Alice Kober and Michael Ventris. Kober, a classicist at Brooklyn College, meticulously recorded grammatical patterns on thousands of index cards, proving that the language was inflected—meaning that word endings changed to indicate grammatical relationships. Following her untimely death, Ventris, an architect with a passion for codes, built upon her work. By constructing a grid that mapped consonant and vowel relationships, Ventris unlocked the phonetic values of the symbols and realized, to his own surprise, that the tablets were indeed written in an archaic Greek dialect.

[3]
[ 1 ] The tablets did not contain epic poetry or grand historical narratives, as some had hoped, but were instead mundane administrative records: lists of sheep, jars of olive oil, and distributions of bronze to local smiths. Yet, in their very domesticity, these documents provided invaluable insights into the highly centralized palace economy and social hierarchy of late Bronze Age Greece.

Which of the following sentences, if added at the bracketed marker [ 1 ] in the third paragraph, would provide the most logical transition from the second paragraph and introduce the main topic of the third paragraph?