The Michael Ventris Memorial Fund

Extract

MichaelVentris died at the age of 34 last September in a motor accident. His discovery that the Linear B texts of Knossos, Pylos, Mycenae, and other sites were Greek ranks as one of the most brilliant achievements of scholarship, and has been internationally acclaimed a feat of the same order as that of Champollion in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The brilliance of this discovery is matched by its importance; it will take years to work out the consequences of the new knowledge, which proves that Mycenaean civilization was Greek-speaking, gives us texts contemporary and comparable with texts from the adjoining civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, and shows us the state of the Greek language half a millennium before our earliest Greek literature.