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Notes
- 1.
There is a fine new biography of Evans, Minotaur, by Joseph MacGillivray, Hill & Wang, New York, 2000. MacGillivray, an archaeologist living in Crete, notes that Evans was less than 5 feet tall. This is almost impossible to believe until one looks a photograph of him taken as an adult with a group of still active adult fellow boy scouts. He looks miniscule.
- 2.
The hieroglyphics have never been deciphered. They bear some resemblance to Egyptian hieroglyphics from which they may have been derived. The Egyptian hieroglyphics have been deciphered, but the underlying language is not that of Linear A, whose language remains unknown. For a good discussion of these matters see The Story of Archaelogical Decipherment by Maurice Pope, Scribners, New York, 1975.
- 3.
For a biography see, The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris by Andrew Robinson, Thames & Hudson, London, 2002. See also Ventris's collaborator John Chadwick's wonderful book The Decipherment of Linear B, Second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1967. This edition was reprinted in 1992 with an invaluable new postscript. Chadwick, who taught at Cambridge, died in 1998 at the age of 78.
- 4.
IVan R. Dee, 2000, Chicago.
- 5.
I am grateful to Professor Rosane Rocher, who taught Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania, for all her help.
- 6.
An example can be found in J. P. Mallory's book, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989, p. 16. The word for ‘field’
Sanskrit
Ajras
Greek
Agros
Latin
Ager
Gothic
Akrs
I would like to thank Professors Mallory and G. C. Horrocks for helpful correspondence.
- 7.
The full Discourse and much other material can be found in Sir William Jones: A Reader. Edited with Introduction and Notes by Satya S. Pachori, Foreword by Rosane Rocher and a Preface by Peter H. Salus, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1993.
- 8.
This example is given, along with many others, in Historical Linguistics, An Introduction, 2nd Edition by Winfred P. Lehmann, Holt, Rinehart … Winston, 1973, New York.
- 9.
This point of view is adumbrated in Robert Drews' book The Coming of the Greeks, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989. I would like to thank Professor Drews for his friendly help.
- 10.
This timeline is controversial. There is a school of scholars that maintain that Knossos was destroyed by fire no later than 1375 B.C. This is hard to reconcile with the apparent vigor of Cretan culture up to the twelfth century. Linear B was still used on ceramic vessels up to the twelfth century.
- 11.
There is a very rich literature on the deciphering of Linear B. Especially helpful books are The Code Book, by Simon Singh, Anchor Books, New York, 1999.
The Bull of Minos by Leonard Cottrell, Efstathiadis, Athens, 1999.
I have already cited John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B, but there is also his book, Reading the Past, Linear B and Related Scripts, University of California/British Museum, Los Angeles, 1997. There are several websites where you can find “ponys” of Ventris's deciphering. I had one of them on my visit to the National Archeological Museum, and there is Robinson's book previously cited.
- 12.
The actual discovery of the first tablet at Pylos was made by one of Wace's young assistants, Margaret Dow. She later married Murray Gell-Mann, the inventor of quarks. Gell-Mann told me that when his late wife brought Wace the tablet he was engaged in a conversation with some Greek dignitary. It took some time for her to get his attention.
- 13.
See Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B, op. cit., Chapter 4, for a discussion of these reports. This quote is found on p. 60.
- 14.
Chadwick, op. cit., p. 66.
- 15.
If you want to look up these sites you will find that simply using “Linear B” in your search engine will turn up all sorts of sites devoted to linear algebra and the like. Something like “Linear B” + “Minoan” will restrict things.
- 16.
For one view and a discussion of other possibilities see, for example, The End of the Bronze Age by Robert Drews, Princeton University Press, Princeton. For a good discussion of the Pylos tablets see The Mycenaean World, by John Chadwick, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976.
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(2008). All That Glitters. In: Physicists on Wall Street and Other Essays on Science and Society. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-76506-8_10
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