6 - THE DECIPHERMENT AND THE CRITICS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
Summary
One afternoon in May 1953 the telephone rang in my flat in Cambridge. Michael Ventris had called me from London in a great state of excitement—he rarely showed signs of emotion, but for him this was a dramatic moment. The cause was a letter he had received from Professor Blegen, the excavator of Pylos. We knew that Blegen had found more tablets in 1952, but no one had yet examined them carefully; they had been cleaned during the winter and only the next spring were they ready for study. Blegen's letter ran:
Since my return to Greece I have spent much of my time working on the tablets from Pylos, getting them properly ready to be photographed. I have tried your experimental syllabary on some of them.
Enclosed for your information is a copy of P641, which you may find interesting. It evidently deals with pots, some on three legs, some with four handles, some with three, and others without handles. The first word by your system seems to be ti-ri-po-de and it recurs twice as ti-ri-po (singular?). The four-handled pot is preceded by qe-to-ro-we, the three-handled by ti-ri-o-we or ti-ri-jo-we, the handleless pot by a-no-we. All this seems too good to be true. Is coincidence excluded?
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- The Decipherment of Linear B , pp. 81 - 100Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990