“A Frivolous Digression” – Did the Decipherment of Linear B Transform the Aegean Late Bronze Age?
In theory the decipherment – by Michael Ventris, building on work by Alice Kober, Emmett Bennett and others – should have transformed the way we study the Aegean Late Bronze Age, moving it from a wholly prehistoric to a historical era. Despite the brilliance of the decipherment itself, the ability to to read the documents caused a degree of disappointment. The tablets were – as Evans himself had already made clear – primarily accounting documents. Particularly missed were written predecessors to the epic poetry of Homer, which had formed much of the basis for interpretation in the first half of the 20th century, before the decipherment. There were two immediate effects on our ‘reading’ of the Aegean Late Bronze Age. First, the reality of the texts generated a reaction against ‘Homeric’ readings of Late Bronze Age society and a call to employ comparison with similar systems in the contemporary Near East, championed particularly by Moses Finley. Second, there was an appreciation of the texts’ value in documenting the history of the Greek language some five centuries before Homer. The latter, however, had the unfortunate effect of cementing an ‘essentialist’ view of Greek identity attached to language, linking the achievements of the Classical age to the Late Bronze Age. Meanwhile the other two major Aegean scripts – Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A – remained (and remain) undeciphered.
With this as background, the current paper explores – 70 years on – the reverberations of the decipherment of Linear B within the field of Aegean Late Bronze Age Archaeology and offers a brief coda contrasting the implications of the non-decipherment of the other two Aegean scripts.
