Question

Passage:
For much of the early twentieth century, the decipherment of Linear B—a script found on clay tablets unearthed by Arthur Evans at Knossos, Crete, in 1900—was stymied by both a lack of accessible data and entrenched archaeological dogma. Evans, operating under the assumption that the script represented an isolated, indigenous "Minoan" language completely unrelated to Greek, jealously guarded the bulk of the tablets, publishing only a fraction of the corpus during his lifetime. This restricted access meant that independent scholars could only formulate highly speculative theories. Furthermore, Evans’s towering reputation effectively enshrined the assumption that Linear B was non-Greek, establishing a paradigm that most contemporary linguists dared not challenge.

The breakthrough in decipherment is typically attributed to Michael Ventris, an English architect who, in 1952, famously demonstrated that Linear B was, in fact, an archaic dialect of Mycenaean Greek. However, Ventris’s phonetic translation was heavily dependent on the rigorous, unsung methodological groundwork laid over the preceding decade by American classicist Alice Kober. Operating in an era before computerized databases, Kober manually cataloged thousands of character occurrences using handmade punch cards. Through exhaustive statistical analysis of character frequency and placement, Kober made a pivotal discovery: she identified distinct patterns of recurring symbol clusters that shared common initial characters but varied in their final symbols.

Kober correctly deduced that these variations indicated an inflected language, one in which word endings are altered to reflect grammatical features such as case, gender, or number. Building on this insight, she constructed what became known as the "Kober grid." This coordinate system mapped the structural relationships between different syllabic signs. Although Kober rigorously refrained from assigning specific phonetic values to the characters—insisting that such a step would be unscientific guesswork without further evidence—her grid conclusively demonstrated that certain symbols shared the same consonant but possessed different vowels, while others shared a vowel but differed in their consonants.

Ironically, Ventris himself had long been a proponent of the "Etruscan hypothesis," adhering strictly to Evans’s orthodox view that the script was not Greek. Ventris initially utilized Kober’s grid to test Etruscan sound values, yielding nonsensical results. It was only when Ventris tentatively applied Greek phonetic values to the grid's structural scaffolding—focusing on likely place names such as Knossos and Amnisos—that the language began to reveal itself. Ultimately, while Ventris supplied the phonetic key that unlocked the script, it was Kober who built the architectural framework that transformed decipherment from a speculative endeavor into a logical certainty.

Based on the passage, which of the following statements regarding the decipherment of Linear B are explicitly supported by the text? (Select all that apply)