The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris - Softcover

Robinson, Andrew

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215 ratings by Goodreads

9780500289983: The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0500289980 ISBN 13: 9780500289983

Publisher: Thames & Hudson, 2012

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“Highly readable . . . a fitting tribute to the quiet outsider who taught the professionals their business and increased our knowledge of the human past.”―Archaeology Odyssey

More than a century ago, in 1900, one of the great archaeological finds of all time was made in Crete. Arthur Evans discovered what he believed was the palace of King Minos, with its notorious labyrinth, home of the Minotaur. As a result, Evans became obsessed with one of the epic intellectual stories of the modern era: the search for the meaning of Linear B, the mysterious script found on clay tablets in the ruined palace.

Evans died without achieving his objective, and it was left to the enigmatic Michael Ventris to crack the code in 1952. This is the first book to tell not just the story of Linear B but also that of the young man who deciphered it. Based on hundreds of unpublished letters, interviews with survivors, and other primary sources, Andrew Robinson’s riveting account takes the reader through the life of this intriguing and contradictory man. Stage by stage, we see how Ventris finally achieved the breakthrough that revealed Linear B as the earliest comprehensible European writing system.

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About the Author:

Andrew Robinson has written more than twenty-five books on the arts and sciences. They include Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts, India: A Short History, and Earthshock, which won the Association of Earth Science Editors Outstanding Publication Award. He is also a regular contributor to magazines, such as Current World Archaeology, History Today, The Lancet, Nature, and Science. A former literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement, he was also a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge.

Review:

“Mr. Robinson has given us a glimpse of genius at work, making significant connections between the work and the life.”
- New York Sun

“Intrinsically fascinating. Robinson . . .has done more than retell the tale, albeit in a more accessible form than ever before.”
- The Boston Globe

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PublisherThames & Hudson
Publication date2012
ISBN 10 0500289980
ISBN 13 9780500289983
BindingPaperback
Number of pages168
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Man Who Deciphered Linear B : The Story of Michael Ventris

Robinson, Andrew

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The Man Who Deciphered Linear B (Paperback)

Andrew Robinson

Published by Thames & Hudson Ltd, London (2012)

ISBN 10: 0500289980 ISBN 13: 9780500289983

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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. First discovered in 1900, on clay tablets among the ruins of the Palace of Minos at Knossos in Crete, Linear B, Europe's oldest writing, remained a mystery for over fifty years. In 1936 Michael Ventris - then a fourteen year-old schoolboy - visited an exhibition at the Royal Academy where the tablets were displayed and heard Sir Arthur Evans, the archaeologist who had discovered them, confirm that the tablets had not yet been deciphered. Ventris was a talented linguist and decided then and there that he would be the one to find the key to Linear B.Dubbed the 'Everest of archaeology', the decipherment was all the more remarkable because Ventris was not a trained classical scholar but an architect whose first, youthful, introduction to Linear B became a lifelong obsession. In 1952 he finally decoded the symbols, finding that its signs did not represent an unknown language as previously believed, but an archaic dialect of Greek, more than 500 years older than the Greek of Homer. Tells the life story of Michael Ventris, interlaced with that of his decipherment of Linear B. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780500289983

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