Read the passage below:
This passage is adapted from an essay on twentieth-century linguistics and classical archaeology.
In October 1936, a fourteen-year-old British student named Michael Ventris attended an exhibition at Burlington House in London marking the anniversary of the British School at Athens. The keynote speaker was Sir Arthur Evans, the renowned archaeologist who had spent decades excavating the Bronze Age complex at Knossos on the island of Crete. Evans showcased several sun-dried clay tablets covered in mysterious, stylized markings. Evans categorized these inscriptions into three distinct phases: a hieroglyphic script, an earlier linear script he termed Linear A, and a later, more pervasive script he designated Linear B. Evans firmly believed that Linear B represented a non-Greek language spoken by the indigenous Minoans, a hypothesis that dominated Aegean archaeology for nearly half a century.
Intrigued by Evans’s presentation, Ventris resolved to decipher Linear B. Rather than pursuing classical studies professionally, however, Ventris trained as an architect, earning his diploma from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1942. Throughout the late 1940s, he pursued his linguistic research in his spare time. He constructed intricate comparative grids, meticulously analyzing the distribution and frequency of eighty-eight distinct syllabic characters recorded on published casts of the tablets. Ventris operated under the methodological assumption that Linear B was a purely syllabic script—where each symbol represented a consonant followed by a vowel—rather than an alphabetic or purely ideographic system.
The prevailing scientific consensus continued to reject any connection between Linear B and early Greek. Historians argued that the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece had merely absorbed Minoan cultural artifacts without adopting Greek as a written medium during the Late Bronze Age. A turning point occurred in 1952 when American archaeologist Carl Blegen published a fresh corpus of hundreds of clay tablets recovered from the mainland palace of Pylos. Blegen’s discovery demonstrated that Linear B was not confined to Crete but was extensively utilized across mainland Mycenaean strongholds.
Using Blegen’s new transcriptions, Ventris noticed specific recurring groups of characters that appeared on the Cretan tablets but were entirely absent from the Pylos tablets. He hypothesized that these localized character clusters represented geographic place names unique to Crete. In May 1952, Ventris successfully decoded one such cluster as Ko-no-so (Knossos) and another as A-mi-ni-so (Amnisos), the port town serving Knossos. When he applied the phonetic values derived from these place names to other vocabulary on the tablets, recognizable Greek words began to emerge. For example, the character combination for 'corselet' aligned with archaic Greek terminology for armor.
On June 18, 1952, Ventris delivered a radio broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, cautiously announcing that Linear B appeared to be an archaic dialect of Greek, predating the epics of Homer by roughly five hundred years. Shortly thereafter, classical philologist John Chadwick of Cambridge University joined Ventris to rigorously test the decipherment against additional tablets. In 1953, Ventris and Chadwick published their landmark paper, 'Evidence for Greek Dialects in the Mycenaean Archives,' in the Journal of Hellenic Studies. Their work conclusively established that Mycenaean Greek was the oldest recorded written dialect of the Indo-European language family.
Based on the information in the passage, is the following statement True or False?
Statement: Michael Ventris learned of Carl Blegen’s newly published clay tablets from Pylos before he completed his architectural diploma in 1942.
Answer: Answer