Soru

For decades after its discovery in the ruins of Knossos, the Bronze Age script known as Linear B remained an undeciphered mystery. Most archaeologists, led by the influential Sir Arthur Evans, assumed that the tablets recorded a non-Greek language spoken by a distinct Minoan civilization. However, in the early 1950s, amateur linguist Michael Ventris tackled the script using a systematic, statistical approach. Rather than searching for bilingual inscriptions or guessing at phonetic values, Ventris constructed a complex grid to track which symbols regularly appeared together or replaced one another, indicating grammatical inflections. Through this meticulous analysis of symbol relationships, Ventris discovered that certain words matched the names of known Cretan cities. When he applied the phonetic values derived from these place names to the rest of the tablets, the words resolved into an archaic dialect of Greek. This discovery shattered the long-held archaeological consensus, proving that the Mycenaeans of the Greek mainland had occupied Crete and adapted the script for their own administration. While the specific grid Ventris constructed was a brilliant tool of logic, its true significance lay in how the resulting decipherment fundamentally redefined the timeline of Greek history and literacy.

Which statement best summarizes the author's primary argument regarding the decipherment of Linear B?