Michael Ventris
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Search complete. 6 mentions across 4 episodes found for "Michael Ventris".
Sep 30, 2026
Rob WattsHOST
But no one, uh, no one could work out what the script actually said, and it took 50 years before anyone made any progress with it really.
Rob WattsHOST
And it was eventually a guy called Michael Ventris who did manage to work out what some of Linear B was.
Rob WattsHOST
And again, uh, it came down to proper nouns, but in this case it was place names, because he managed to find some more Linear B text from mainland Greece.
Rob WattsHOST
And he thought, "Okay, so there are some things that keep appearing a lot in the Cretan text, but not at all in the Greek text, and there are things that appear a lot in the Greek text, but not at all in the Cretan text.
Roland RamblerHOST
Around 1450 BCE, these mainland warlords crossed the sea and took Knossos.
Roland RamblerHOST
They adapted the Minoan script into a new system called Linear B, and when architect Michael Ventris deciphered it in 1952, it revealed an early form of Greek.
Roland RamblerHOST
and confirmed that the Mycenaeans had used it not for poetry or history, but to track chariots, armour, rations and flocks of sheep with obsessive precision.
Roland RamblerHOST
Power often speaks in the language of inventory.
12 MINS LATER
Roland RamblerHOST
While it shared many sign shapes with Linear A, the actual sound values shifted to accommodate this new vocabulary.
Roland RamblerHOST
For a long time, Linear B was just as mysterious as its predecessor.
Roland RamblerHOST
Then, in 1952, an architect and codebreaker named Michael Ventris, working alongside scholar John Chadwick, made an astonishing breakthrough.
Roland RamblerHOST
By studying patterns in the text, such as repeating word endings and localized place names, Ventris established that Linear B encoded an early, archaic form of Greek.
speaker_2NARRATOR
The frustration is compounded by the fact that a later script, Linear B, borrowed many of the same signs.
speaker_2NARRATOR
Linear B was used by the Mycenaean Greeks, who took control of Crete after the Minoan collapse, and Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris, a young British architect with a talent for pattern recognition.
speaker_2NARRATOR
Ventris showed that Linear B recorded an early form of Greek, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the warriors who besieged Troy, the language of the palace bureaucracies that Homer dimly remembered six centuries later.
speaker_2NARRATOR
The decipherment was a triumph, confirmed by the discovery that the tablets recorded exactly the kind of mundane administrative content – inventories of chariots, lists of workers, records of olive oil and grain and sheep – that a palace bureaucracy would be expected to produce.
Paul GreenhalghHOST
But there's a broad hint, and this seems to me to be in the recent literature of consensus, they're probably not Greek.
Paul GreenhalghHOST
But Linear B, amazingly, in the early 1950s were translated by a man called Michael Ventris and then others as well.
Paul GreenhalghHOST
And they transpired to be in early Greek.
Paul GreenhalghHOST
That's pretty incredible.