For decades after Arthur Evans uncovered the clay tablets of Knossos, scholars assumed that Linear B recorded a non-Indo-European tongue spoken by a pre-Greek civilization. This prevailing consensus stalled decipherment efforts, as researchers futilely sought linguistic parallels in Etruscan or Basque. In 1952, however, Michael Ventris approached the script not as an exotic isolated language, but under the working hypothesis that the signs represented an archaic dialect of Greek itself. By matching the repetitive inflectional suffixes of the Knossos tablets to geographic place names known from classical antiquity, Ventris demonstrated that the tablets were indeed early Greek administrative records. This breakthrough proved that the Mycenaeans had established dominance over Crete far earlier than previously assumed, rewriting the history of the Bronze Age Aegean.
According to the passage, the assertion that researchers "futilely sought linguistic parallels in Etruscan or Basque" indicates that scholars:
- unproductively searched for grammatical similarities between Linear B and languages that did not offer a valid matchAnswer
- Bsuccessfully proved that Linear B shared key structural features with both Etruscan and Basque
- Cmistakenly assumed that Etruscan and Basque were the direct ancestors of classical Greek
- Dchose to pause their work on Linear B to translate unrelated Etruscan and Basque records