How was Linear B deciphered?

Michael Ventris, building on Alice Kober's analysis and using sign-frequency patterns and place names, showed that Linear B recorded an early form of Greek; John Chadwick helped confirm and develop the decipherment.

Why do some ancient scripts remain undeciphered?

Decipherment is very difficult without a bilingual text, a known related language, or a large enough corpus; scripts like the Indus script lack these aids, so their values and even the language they record remain uncertain.

Decipherment of Ancient Scripts

How previously unreadable ancient writing systems are deciphered, recovering lost languages and the evidence they hold for language history.

Definition

Decipherment of ancient scripts is the process of determining the values of the signs of a previously unreadable writing system and identifying the language it records, thereby making its texts intelligible.

Scope

This topic covers the decipherment of ancient and unknown scripts: the types of writing systems (logographic, syllabic, alphabetic), the methods used to crack them (bilinguals, known names, frequency analysis, and linguistic hypotheses), landmark successes such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Linear B, and the scripts that remain undeciphered.

Core questions

What methods are used to decipher an unknown script?
What roles do bilingual texts, proper names, and sign-frequency analysis play?
How are the type of script and the underlying language identified?
What are the landmark decipherments, and how were they achieved?
Why do some scripts remain undeciphered?

Key theories

Combinatorial method of decipherment: Decipherment typically combines internal analysis of sign frequencies and combinations with external clues such as bilingual texts and known proper names, plus hypotheses about the underlying language, as in Ventris and Chadwick's decipherment of Linear B as an early form of Greek.

History

Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822, aided by the Rosetta Stone, was a foundational success. Cuneiform was deciphered through the nineteenth century, and Michael Ventris, with John Chadwick, deciphered Linear B as Mycenaean Greek in 1952. Such breakthroughs recovered entire bodies of historical-linguistic evidence; scripts such as the Indus script remain undeciphered.

Debates

Claims of decipherment for contested scripts: For scripts such as the Indus script or Linear A, rival decipherment claims are debated, and many are rejected for lacking the constraints (such as a known language or bilingual) that made successful decipherments verifiable.

Key figures

Jean-Francois Champollion
Michael Ventris
John Chadwick

Seminal works

chadwick1958
robinson2002

Frequently asked questions

How was Linear B deciphered?: Michael Ventris, building on Alice Kober's analysis and using sign-frequency patterns and place names, showed that Linear B recorded an early form of Greek; John Chadwick helped confirm and develop the decipherment.
Why do some ancient scripts remain undeciphered?: Decipherment is very difficult without a bilingual text, a known related language, or a large enough corpus; scripts like the Indus script lack these aids, so their values and even the language they record remain uncertain.