Word: minoan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week in the U.S. quarterly Archaeology, a plausible solution came from an amateur: a young (31) London architect named Michael Ventris. It so happened that as a schoolboy of thirteen, Ventris heard a lecture by Sir Arthur Evans, has been fascinated by the Minoan mystery ever since. If his present solution is correct, scholars will not only have to rewrite the history of Crete, they will also have to change their ideas about the civilization of the pre-Homeric Greeks...
...first Ventris also favored the idea that the tablets were Minoan. That being the case, he had few hints as to their meaning, except for the tiny pictures (e.g., a horse's head, a chariot, a cup) that accompanied some of the text. Otherwise, the writing seemed to consist of about 88 "signs," each one apparently denoting a syllable. With the help of Cambridge Philologist John Chadwick, Ventris began experimenting. He counted the frequencies of various signs, tried to determine how often they might appear at the beginning, the middle, or the end of words. Then he began...