Cracking the code of Linear B
antigonejournal.com
antigonejournal.com
One Oxfordian liked to take the English names of visiting scholars, turn them into Linear B, and then back into Greek using the very loose Ventris rules, only to find that some Greek god would always come out.
But this example is more fun (courtesy of Michael C. Stokes by way of Douglas Young):
Arma uirumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris...
a-ma wi-ru-qe ka-no to-ro-ja qi-pi-ri-mu a-po-ri
halmai wiluite kainos Tholoiai Diphilimus apolis
ἅλμαι ἰλύι τε καινῶς Θολῳᾳ Διφιλιμος ἄπολις
That is, the first line of Virgil's Aeneid (Latin) -> Linear B -> Greek. My trans: "With brine and slime, at Tholoia [place of beehive tombs], Diphilimus is made a ruined city in an inventive way."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27201234 has an excerpt.
but then getting points deducted because I didn't use the right method for arriving at the solution
The typical solution would be to squint at it and write down the classical Greek form. That would be roughly equivalent to me talking English in Holland because I'm shy of Dutch, as a German native.
“Of arms and a man of Troy i sing who first from shores”
Turns into absolutely unrelated gibberish when applying the deciphering phonetic maps, and comparing the meanings.
* nerd alert: I wrote the English with the word order in Latin, which has a endings-based freedom to word order allowing planned beats, in this case dactylic hexameter…Latin rap sort of when i think of it
This interacts with the highly inflectional nature of Greek; imagine a scheme for deciphering an unknown text into English which allowed the decipherer to insert, at any point, any word that might not be capitalized in standard English title case: to, for, the, of, and, but, with, ..., along with whatever plural or possessive markers they wished.
Ventris’ faith in Etruscan was absurd, and I wish the apparently funny story event that disabused him had been related. The Etruscans lived on the western coast of Italy and while they had some colonies on islands further west never had a great extent of travel, much less to Knossos! It’s not even clear they would have existed from the late Stone Age! That’s a classic high school mistake.
Most of the other peoples in Europe stem from migration of people of Indo-European descent, coming in several waves, from the south (via Anatolia) and from the north.
Groups of people moved around, settled and over time slowly diverged between each other, forming a cultural and linguistic continuum where each group of people spoke a dialect barely different from their neighbors but gradually diverging more as the distance increases.
Then some groups moved around even more (pushed by various environmental factors) breaking the continuum and introducing more stronger distinctions as a group became in contact with another group that was farther away in the cultural-linguistic continuum. The starker differences between a group and its neighbors accelerate the independent evolution of the linguistic traits.
Repeat the mix several times and you end up with producing a huge variety of distinct languages that are no longer mutually intelligible between each other.
Yet ateast in principle it's possible to trace back the genealogy of each of the languages and it reveals that the journey of a group of people in a piece of land is radically different from a group of people living right next to it.
I'm going to focus on languages because that's my area or interest. It roughly correlates with the culture and ethnic identifications but it's not a perfect match and in particular it doesn't necessary correlate strongly with the actual ethnicities (or genetics) because when groups mix the degree of genetic mixing and linguistic mixing varies. For example it's not uncommon that a group conquers another group, imposing their language and culture over them but the conquered group remains relatively unmixed (non-intermarried) with the conquerors.
For example most of the ancient groups in pre-roman Italy peninsula share a common "Italic" origin. That includes Oscan, Latin, Faliscan, Ligurian, Venetic and other Celtic languages of cisalpine Gaul.
But some like Messapic, native to southern italy, while still being of Indo-European origin, don't belong to that same branch. Nor it's related to the Greek of the other side of the Adriatic. Whether that's because of a later migration or because of a previous wave, I don't know (nor I know if it's known).
But the existence of that case (as many other cases) is a showcase how the idea that Etruscans are related with other groups somewhere else in the Mediterranean basin (or even in Anatolia) is not such a crazy idea.
- Etruscan is not considered an Indo European language
- Etruscan is part of a larger family of languages: the Tyrsenian. Other members are the Raetic language, which was spoken in North Italy, Switzerland and parts of Austria. And also Lemnian, which was spoken in some parts of the Aegean sea.
I still remain uncomfortable with the stability of Etruscan over that long period, though the whole point of the article — that there was adequate stability in Greek over that same span — rather makes this feeling rather silly.
* this is sort of the subtext of the article itself.
You refer to those few cases where language does not correspond to DNA ?
Later books did a much better job shining a light on Ventris' collaborators, in particular the scientifically far more rigorous Alice Kober (e.g. The Riddle of the Labyrinth), but I will never forget reading Chadwick with 14, or thereabouts, and feeling profoundly affected. A formative read, even if the actual state of science on Linear B is quite a bit more complicated!
Attempts to comprehend lost scripts such as Linear B, Mayan script, and Harappan seals all use similar techniques. Do you have some alternative or are you insisting that these attempts to decipher ancient scripts are fundamentally flawed?