In 1952, Michael Ventris announced that Linear B, the script found on clay tablets excavated at Knossos and Pylos, was a Mycenaean dialect of Greek. Prior to this, the prevailing scholarly consensus, championed by Arthur Evans, held that Minoan civilization was completely distinct from the later Hellenic culture, and thus the script could not possibly encode Greek. Ventris’s breakthrough rested on several methodological innovations. Rather than attempting to match Linear B signs to known languages immediately, he performed a rigorous statistical analysis of the sign frequencies and their occurrence in varying word endings. This structural approach led him to hypothesize that Linear B was a syllabary, and that the varying endings represented grammatical inflections.
A crucial, albeit often understated, component of Ventris's success was his eventual willingness to abandon the assumption that the language was Etruscan or Pelasgian. The turning point arrived when Ventris applied values derived from the classical Cypriot syllabary to a subset of Linear B words that he suspected were place names, such as Knossos and Amnisos. The resulting phonetic decipherment yielded recognizable Greek words. However, the academic establishment remained largely skeptical until the subsequent discovery of the 'Tripod Tablet' at Pylos. This tablet featured drawings of tripods and other vessels, accompanied by Linear B text that, when read with Ventris's phonetic values, translated exactly to the Greek words for 'tripods' and 'vessels with four handles.' The Tripod Tablet provided independent, visual confirmation of the decipherment, rendering the Greek hypothesis undeniable. Yet, some linguists point out that Ventris’s initial reliance on the Cypriot syllabary—a system centuries younger than Linear B—was highly speculative and heavily dependent on the serendipitous stability of place names over millennia.
The passage provides the most support for concluding that Ventris’s application of phonetic values from the classical Cypriot syllabary would likely have failed to yield recognizable Greek words if which one of the following had been true?
- AThe wider academic establishment had encouraged Ventris to utilize the Cypriot syllabary because of its well-documented historical connection to Mycenaean culture.
- BThe classical Cypriot syllabary was a linguistic system that had been developed several centuries before the emergence of the Linear B script.
- The names of specific Mycenaean geographical locations had undergone significant phonetic alterations between the era of Linear B and the classical era.Answer
- DArthur Evans had previously established that the place names found on the Knossos and Pylos tablets were derived from a Hellenic dialect.
- EEvery sign in the classical Cypriot syllabary perfectly corresponded to a grammatical inflection that Ventris had identified in his statistical analysis.