Word: minoan
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Author Renault ably dramatizes the cultural clash between Mycenean Greece (masculine, simple-souled and semiprimitive), and Minoan Crete (effeminate, sophisticated and decadent). She has obviously lived her period, which is the closest a historical novelist can ever come to making a period live...
...after the Crete discovery -that Michael Ventris, British architect and cryptographer, broke Linear B, announced that its 87 "signs" closely paralleled Greek syllables (TIME, April 19, 1954). But what about Linear A? Even Ventris, who died in 1956 at 34, thought that the language on the tablets must be Minoan, now completely unknown...
Last week Cyrus Gordon, professor of Near Eastern languages at Brandeis University, offered a solution to the mystery. Linear A, says he, does indeed use Minoan signs, but these parallel Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) syllables. Just as Ventris' discovery revealed that the Achaeans of the Greek mainland were not the illiterates that a reading of Homer suggests, but might well have been the civilized conquerors of Crete, so Gordon's thesis sheds a whole new light on the possible foundations of Greek civilization itself...
Ulysses (Lux; Paramount) brings to the screen the greatest adventure story of the Western world. Visually, the picture could scarcely be better. The camera's Cyclopean eye stares deep into the Minoan age that has come down only in legend and a few tantalizing shards from Peloponnesus and Crete. Misty islands float in a magic wide-screen sea, naiads romp along the water's edge, enchantresses lurk in sacred groves, galleys roll and toss on angry waves conjured up by Poseidon...
...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...