Mycenaean Greek

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.

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.

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.

The discovery proved that Greek had been spoken in the Aegean 500 years earlier than previously thought, and it established a direct linguistic link between the Mycenaean civilization and the later classical world.

The palaces were destroyed or abandoned for the final time.

The writing system, Linea A, disappeared.

Mycenaean Greeks from the mainland took control of Crete and the Aegean, imposed their language and their writing system, and the Minoan world ended.

Whether the eruption directly caused the collapse is genuinely unresolved.