The Rosetta Stone: The Rebirth of Ancient Egypt by John Ray

Author:John Ray [Ray, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674024939
Goodreads: 745025
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2017-10-07T05:00:00+00:00

15. Angelic: Michael Ventris, decipherer of Linear B, c. 1945.

Dramatic proof of the decipherment of the Cretan script came with the discovery of a new tablet, showing pictures of tripods with varying numbers of handles and captions next to them. These captions made perfect sense in an early form of Greek: tripods with two, four or no ears. Ventris himself was to call the tripod tablet ‘a sort of Rosetta Stone’, but it was a Rosetta Stone which came after the event, not before it. The history of decipherment, however, is a fraught one, as we have seen with Young and Champollion. There were mutterings that Ventris must have known about the thing all along, by critics who had run out of anything better to say. Scepticism about Ventris’s decipherment persisted well into the 1970s, in spite of the clear evidence that he could never have set eyes on the tripod tablet when he drew up his grid. This sort of thing appeals to the kind of academic who makes a career out of bending over backwards to deny the obvious. Now the scepticism is finished and Ventris’s achievement is recognised for what it is.

The techniques used on Linear B are close to some of those used by professional cryptographers, and this is one reason why this decipherment is so admired. Like Champollion, Ventris died young, in his case as a result of a car accident in 1956. This increases the poignancy of his work. But the truth is that the tablets themselves are limited in what they can tell us, being for the most part inventories. So far we have no literature in Linear B, no personal letters and no history. These may have been written on other materials which have perished. In the case of Egypt, we have precisely this sort of material, in the form of papyrus, and with it we can gain access to the humanity of the ancient Egyptians. It is Champollion’s devotion to the texts on the Rosetta Stone that brought this humanity back to us, and this will be the subject of the next chapter. Decipherment is not a purely intellectual exercise; it is the restoration of people’s thoughts and lives.

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