Original subtitles

[tense upbeat music]

- [Narrator] A mysterious ancient writing.

- Some legends are true.

- [Narrator] Decoding it will take 50 years.

- It's been called the Everest of Greek archeology.

- [Narrator] Lead to obsession.

- She was so single-minded,

she appeared almost completely devoid of a personal life.

- [Narrator] And tragedy.

[car crashes] [glasses breaking]

But it will ultimately unlock the secrets

of a lost civilization

and rewrite history.

- It reshapes our vision of the Greek world.

- [Narrator] These are the codes that changed our world,

bizarre markings, random letters and numbers,

words that make no sense.

But cracking them unlocks military secrets,

decodes ancient civilizations,

and reveals enemies in our midst.

Now we uncover how they were decoded,

the genius minds that broke them,

and the secrets they reveal.

[tense upbeat music]

[dramatic upbeat music]

100 Miles off mainland Greece lies the Mediterranean island

of Crete, the backdrop for some of the greatest stories

in Greek mythology,

from the secret hideout of Zeus, king of the gods,

to the deadly Minotaur that struck fear into the islanders.

In 1900, eccentric British archeologist Arthur Evans

landed on Crete to begin the hunt for proof

of a long lost civilization.

- There's all this legendary stories about Crete.

Arthur Evans understands,

thinks that he should be looking for a large palace,

a kind of structure where legendary kings may have lived.

- [Narrator] Evans believes a sight

on the north central coast of the island

could be the lost ancient city of Knossos

ruled over by the mythical King Minos.

- Sir Arthur Evans had been able to discern for some time

that there was a significant structure there,

but I don't think he could have possibly imagined

what he was going to find.

[tense upbeat music]

- [Narrator] Within days of the dig starting,

Evans hits the jackpot.

- As Arthur Evans is digging, he sees material coming up,

large building blocks, stone blocks.

- He knew very quickly

that he had made a spectacular archeological find.

- [Narrator] Evans has uncovered an incredible lost world

buried for 3,000 years.

- The scale of this building was much larger

than anything known at the time.

It's basically twice as big as your average city block.

- The experience of slowly unearthing this

must have been absolutely incredible for Sir Arthur Evans.

I think it was quite possibly beyond his wildest dreams.

[invigorating music]

- [Narrator] Arthur Evans has discovered

what could only be the mythical palace of King Minos.

- He unearthed the ruins of a sprawling Bronze Age palace

with hundreds of rooms, beautiful pottery,

the crumbling remnants of beautiful frescoes.

- It's a knowledge and understanding of engineering

that would've seemed almost impossible for people

at that time to believe or comprehend.

- He knew that his suspicion that he should dig at Knossos

had been confirmed.

- [Narrator] But the palace is just the beginning.

Evans goes on to uncover the remains of a vast

and highly sophisticated city surrounding the palace.

It dates back more than three millennia to the Bronze Age,

a time when most of Western civilization

was still living in simple huts.

- A vast, sprawling, wealthy, very accomplished kingdom.

- One of the estimates for the population is 18,000 people.

So we hadn't kind of realized that there would've been

that high a population in a single place in pre-history.

- It certainly was the earliest known city in Europe.

- [Narrator] Arthur Evans has unearthed an ancient city

way ahead of its time.

But what he's desperate to find

is some form of written record of the people

who created Europe's very first metropolis.

- He came there looking for writing

and he was a man of supreme self confidence

and, in this case, justifiably so because he found it.

- [Narrator] Within weeks of discovering Knossos,

Evans and his team begin to unearth hundreds of fragments

of clay tablets, each one inscribed with a mysterious form

of writing.

Evans believes these curious symbols and markings

are a clue to the lives of this unknown civilization.

- What thrilled Evans was he knew he had come upon

Europe's oldest written records,

an entire European civilization that had languished

for 30 centuries in the dusk of prehistory.

- [Narrator] Unlocking the secrets of this lost city

means deciphering the 3,000-year-old code.

But that's a monumental challenge

because no one has seen anything like this ancient script

before.

- An unknown writing system used to write

an unknown language.

That is the linguistic equivalent of a locked room mystery.

- [Narrator] Arthur Evans has no idea

what language the ancient script recorded,

but the images or pictograms used within the text

give a clue to the tablets' contents.

- There were tablets about grain, tablets about livestock.

And so what Evans knew immediately

was he had come upon the administrative records

of a lavish, thriving European civilization

that existed a thousand years

before the Greek classical period.

- This is a real glimpse, potentially,

into real, everyday life thousands of years ago.

- [Narrator] Evans was sure

that deciphering the mysterious text

could help him rewrite history,

but his plan to unlock the ancient's lost secrets

is about to come unstuck.

[tense upbeat music]

[pensive music]

As Evans unearths more and more clay tablets

from the Knossos site,

it becomes clear there are subtle differences

in some of the fragments.

The only explanation is that he has discovered

more than just one type of writing.

- Evans knew that he was looking at two related,

yet different scripts.

So did these two different scripts

record two different languages or the same language?

- [Narrator] Arthur Evans names the two scripts Linear A

and Linear B.

Although there are similarities

in the individual characters,

Linear A inscriptions are smaller and shorter.

- If you compare Linear A and Linear B,

Linear A documents tend to be almost quite messy.

- [Narrator] Linear B is the opposite,

more complex, more detailed, and more organized.

- The Linear B tablets are almost always ruled

where the text sits on horizontal rules

that were inscribed on the wet clay

before the characters were written on top of them.

- [Narrator] Two different writing systems.

They're clearly connected, but how?

Could they be the languages of two different civilizations,

one more sophisticated than the other?

Or is the explanation something else entirely?

[gentle suspenseful music]

By 1905, Arthur Evans is back in Britain

at his hilltop mansion,

overlooking the famous dreaming spires of Oxford.

Here, Evans spends the next three years trying to unlock

the mysterious script.

But his efforts get him nowhere.

- No one knew what language these symbols recorded,

much less what the tablet said.

- Ancient scripts are not there to confuse us.

It's just that the passage of time

has meant that we have no idea what these symbols

and signs mean.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Evans wasn't the first person

to face such a perplexing task.

200 years earlier,

another lost script was causing similar problems in Egypt.

The meaning of hieroglyphs,

the strange and wonderful writing system devised and used

for centuries by the ancient Egyptians,

had been lost for almost two millennia.

- Hieroglyphs are a special language for communication

with the gods.

So we see them adorning all the beautiful temple complexes

across Egypt.

It's a special sacred language.

- [Narrator] But on July 15th, 1799,

French soldiers under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte

made a surprise discovery in a small town on the Nile delta

called Rosetta.

- Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in the late 18th century.

And in 1799, they were excavating an area

where they're effectively entrenched themselves.

- They come up to an old wall and in the old wall,

they spot this damaged, crushed inscription.

And the chief officer, Pierre-Francois Bouchard,

immediately recognizes this is something interesting.

- [Narrator] Just like Arthur Evans,

the soldiers had discovered an ancient tablet,

this time carrying an inscribed message

in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

But crucially, it carried the same message

carved in other languages as well.

- The most important feature is that the Rosetta Stone

has three different languages with one language

being known at the time.

And that enabled the other languages to be unlocked.

- [Narrator] When Napoleon's army was defeated

by the British three years later,

it was forced to hand over all looted antiquities.

That included the tablet that would become known

as the Rosetta Stone.

- The French army did know that it was important

and they did make drawings so that they could study

the inscription, I think, especially when they realized

they were gonna have to hand it over to the British army.

- [Narrator] When the Rosetta Stone arrived in England,

experts immediately recognized it held the key

to solving one of archeology's greatest mysteries,

how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs.

But who cracked it first?

- What we end up having is this kind of exciting race

between British and French scholars.

- [Narrator] In England, it was the scholar Thomas Young

who would make the first major step forward.

- He's often referred to as the last man

who knew everything.

He made breakthroughs in medicine.

He made breakthroughs in physics.

He did all sorts of amazing things

and he managed to make some breakthroughs

in understanding hieroglyphs.

- [Narrator] Despite having the same message

in three different scripts,

cracking the hieroglyph code proved elusive

until Young made an educated guess that paid off.

- Among the hieroglyphs were a cartouche.

A cartouche is a set of hieroglyphs that are ringed.

And that means they mean something important.

What could be important?

Well, maybe the name of a pharaoh.

- [Narrator] Studying the Greek translation

on the Rosetta Stone revealed the name of a pharaoh,

Ptolemy.

- Thomas Young said,

"Well, what about if the cartouche

represents the name of Ptolemy

and maybe each of the hieroglyphs within the cartouche

represent elements of the name of Ptolemy."

[tense upbeat music]

- That's how he breaks it down.

And we start getting names, we start getting sounds.

And then the language comes to life.

It's not just a picture.

It's a writing system that has sounds we can attach to it.

- [Narrator] The Rosetta Stone gave experts the key

that would unlock the meaning

of the mysterious ancient Egyptian script.

[tense dramatic music]

Two centuries later, archeologist Arthur Evans

is also trying to decode a lost language,

but he doesn't have a Rosetta Stone to guide him.

By 1907, Evans has become obsessed with being the person

who will finally unlock Linear B.

But his single minded determination

leads him to make a mistake that will ensure

the lost language is never translated in his lifetime.

- Arthur Evans published very few photographs

and drawings of them,

which meant that almost no data about these weird symbols

were accessible to other scholars.

This was his find and he would be damned

if anyone cracked the code of the script before he did.

- He's on the tracks and he wants to be the guy

who gets there first.

His reluctance to release the materials he'd found

certainly didn't help the process of decipherment.

[tense upbeat music]

- [Narrator] Arthur Evans becomes convinced

the neater Linear B tablets record the language

of the most sophisticated people ever to live at Knossos,

a population who lived in the shadows

of an elaborate palace, which according to myth

was home to the ruler, King Minos.

- King Minos was the son of Zeus and Europa

in Greek mythology.

He was a sort of legendary king who was very powerful

and so he was able to accrue a great

and tremendous amount of wealth.

- Crete as a superpower is associated historically

with King Minos.

So when Sir Arthur Evans stumbles upon this giant palace

on Crete, one can see how this myth comes alive.

- [Narrator] According to Greek legend,

King Minos' palace was home to a labyrinth

which held the mythical half man, half bull, Minotaur.

[foreboding music]

- All these things must have been evoking all those stories

and kind of bringing history and myth to life in a way.

- We had always thought that this was only a legend,

but here we are proving that history and archeology

shows that some legends are true.

- [Narrator] Evans' names the lost civilization the Minoans

after King Minos.

And he's determined to prove that Linear B

records the language they spoke.

- It was imperative to him for reasons of scholarship,

but also for reasons of ego to decipher these tablets

and in so doing shed a vast glorious light

on this Minoan civilization that he had unearthed.

- [Narrator] But his stubborn obsession

that the lost language belonged to the Minoans

will turn out to be a tragic error of judgment.

- One danger of doing that is when we approach writing

with expectations of what it's going to be,

that does shape the way that we view the writing

and what we find.

- Arthur Evans was a remarkable individual

who certainly was pioneering.

But in other ways, he held back our understanding

of this language.

[gentle tense music]

- [Narrator] After three years

of obsessive cataloging the tablets,

the only thing Evans can say for sure

is that they are lists, but he has no idea at all

what any of those lists actually say.

Then in 1908, a new discovery in Crete

appears to throw Evans the lifeline he desperately needs.

On the other side of the island,

archeologists have unearthed another ancient town

dating to a similar time as Knossos.

- There's an important site called Phaistos.

It also had a fairly large palace.

And as they were excavating this palace,

they come upon a certain room, effectively a basement.

And in there, they find a single circular tablet.

- [Narrator] The circular tablet is exquisite

and is covered in a form of script made entirely of images

or pictograms.

Each one has been stamped into the clay

and some of the images appear to be similar

to those found on the tablets from Knossos.

- Some of these seem a bit familiar

and like they might relate to some of the pictures

we've seen in Linear A and Linear B,

but we've just never seen anything like this,

stamped in this particular way.

- [Narrator] The mysterious disc has been made

using techniques far in advance of the clay tablets

Evans unearthed.

[rousing music]

But other artifacts it was discovered with

prove it was created long before the Linear B tablets.

Could the disc's images be a precursor

to the writing system found on the clay tablets

from Knossos?

- There are 242 different stamped pictograms on it

that represent 46 different types of symbols.

The pictograms have a man with what looks like a bit

of a mohawk hairstyle to other pictures of objects.

- This is very unique and different.

The way it's written, first of all,

is that it looks like a spiral.

You have these symbols that we think are written

from the inside to the outside.

It seems to be related to some kind of language,

but how you would read this

and what language it would be in are mysteries.

[suspenseful music]

- [Narrator] Back in England,

despite studying the Phaistos disc for weeks,

Arthur Evans draws a blank.

Perhaps the disc is yet another indication

of the Minoan's advanced civilization.

- This could be a missing link,

but there's not enough evidence to say one way or another.

- [Narrator] It isn't the Rosetta Stone Evans is hoping for

in his quest to crack Linear A or B.

Despite finding fame as the discoverer

of one of the most incredible ancient cities on Earth,

it is Evans' single minded obsession with decoding Linear B

that will come to dominate his life for the next 30 years.

- Arthur Evans did really important groundwork

preparing the materials and presenting them in a format

which others could make use of

once they were at least made available.

Ultimately, collaboration is usually the way

these things end up being solved.

- [Narrator] But Evans is not a natural collaborator

and he will never uncover the secrets of the tablets.

- Arthur Evans dies as a kind of defeated person

in terms of trying to decipher language.

He doesn't ever resolve what the language is.

[pensive music]

- [Narrator] And he had no one to blame but himself.

- He had made almost no headway,

partly because he was married to the notion

that the Linear B script recorded the language

of the Minoans.

It stopped him from seeing what Linear B really was.

- [Narrator] Arthur Evans dies age 90 in 1941.

[cannon booms]

The chaos of World War II means his death

goes largely unrecognized in his home country.

But 3,000 miles away across the Atlantic in New York,

a professor of classics at Brooklyn College

is mourning his loss.

Like Evans before her, 35-year-old Alice Kober

has become fixated on Linear B.

When Evans dies without decoding the ancient language,

she grabs the opportunity to step into his shoes.

- Alice Kober taught classics by day,

by night, working obsessively at her kitchen table

in her modest Brooklyn home.

She hoard over every element of the script

that was available to her.

She was so single-minded,

she appeared almost completely devoid of a personal life.

- [Narrator] Arthur Evans had been obsessed

with finding connections between Linear B

and what he discovered about Minoan culture.

But Alice Kober does something completely different

because unlike Evans, she doesn't care whose language it is.

She simply wants to crack its code.

- Alice Kober approaches Linear B

in a very analytical fashion.

So she uses, basically, frequency analysis

to try to understand the signs of Linear B

and what their values may be.

- [Narrator] Frequency analysis is a method first identified

by the godfather of code breaking,

the 9th century Arab scholar, Al-Kindi.

- Al-Kindi is one of the great philosophers.

Living in the 9th century in Baghdad,

he wrote 200, 300 books on all sorts of subjects

from astronomy to astrology, from theology to cryptography.

Al-Kindi wrote the very first manuscript we have

on how to crack a code.

- [Narrator] Al-Kindi's works describe in detail

how to decrypt a code when the meanings of the symbols

are completely unknown.

- What Al-Kindi focused on was the frequency of letters.

Every letter has a certain frequency.

E is very, very common in English.

Q is really rather rare.

So if we replace E with a square and Q with a triangle,

we have loads and loads of squares in the encrypted message

and very, very few triangles.

And that helps us work out that the square is really an E

and the triangle is really a Q.

- [Narrator] Al-Kindi's discovery

meant he could crack almost any code

where letters had been replaced with symbols.

- Now, this idea was revolutionary

and it must have given Al-Kindi and the people he worked for

tremendous power to be able to interpret and understand

the secret messages of their rivals.

- [Narrator] Although Linear B isn't a cipher

purposely designed to hide secrets,

it is the code of a lost language.

So Alice Kober figures the principles of frequency analysis

might still apply.

- Alice Kober is able to identify, through repetition,

the frequency of certain symbols together.

- [Narrator] For years, she meticulously records

the frequency of every symbol and every character inscribed

on the tablets.

But it wasn't always an easy task.

- During World War II and after,

paper was a very scarce commodity.

So she hand-cut and annotated thousands and thousands

of index cards from any spare paper she could find

which she stored inside the one paper product

of which she sadly seemed to have no short supply,

and that was empty cigarette cartons.

- She has no computer, she has no database.

She had 180,000 index cards that she had made.

So she did all of this by hand.

- [Narrator] After years of achingly slow analysis

of the letters and their patterns,

Alice makes a game-changing discovery.

- Sometimes you have a set of the same signs

appearing in multiple different places in tablets,

but with different sets of signs on the end.

These must be the same word, but with different endings.

- The language of the Linear B tablets, whatever it was,

was an inflected language.

That is to say its grammar was built upon word endings,

much as the grammar of Latin or classical Greek.

- [Narrator] Inflections are added to a stem word

to change its meaning.

Adding ER, to read changes it from the verb, read,

to the noun, reader.

Adding an S to dog, turns it into the plural, dogs.

Referencing her 180,000 index cards,

Alice begins to identify Linear B inflections,

the equivalent of ER or S in English,

even though she doesn't know the meaning of the stem words

they're attached to.

She starts to build a grid to show which signs work together

to form words in this mysterious language.

- Now, this is the key.

The grid is the key to the decipherment.

- [Narrator] She may not know what the words mean,

but Alice is beginning to understand the laws that define

how Linear B works, its grammar.

After almost a decade, the classic scholar from Brooklyn

is on target to finally realize Arthur Evans' dream

of decoding the lost language.

But in 1950, tragedy strikes.

After years of heavy chain smoking, Alice dies aged just 43.

- To this day, we don't know exactly what killed her.

It was whispered among the women in the family

that Alice Kober had some very rare type of stomach cancer.

- Tragically, Alice doesn't get to see

the fruits of her labor realized.

She doesn't get to read what these tablets actually say.

- Alice Kober got so far, but died young, sadly.

And the grid was certainly far from complete.

[tense upbeat music]

- [Narrator] By 1950,

despite years of obsessive, academic research,

the promise of unlocking the secrets

of the ancient advanced civilization of the Minoans

slips away again.

The lost language of Linear B remains unsolved.

But in London, England,

someone unexpected is about to take up the challenge,

someone with no training at all in either archeology

or classics, an architect who's been obsessed with Linear B

since childhood.

- Michael Ventris goes to a lecture given by Arthur Evans

in the late 1930s and determines at a young age,

he's still a teenager at this point,

that he's going to decipher this language.

- [Narrator] Like Evans and Kober before him,

Ventris' fascination with Linear B borders on obsession.

[cannon booms]

Not even World War II had come between him

and the ancient script.

- Michael Ventris was drafted in the war

and becomes a flight navigator.

So he's very much preoccupied in fighting the war,

but even then, he spends time looking at Linear B,

trying to understand the symbology.

- Michael Ventris is the one who takes up the quest

for a full decipherment in the wake of Alice Kober's work.

- [Narrator] Ventris thinks Alice Kober's grid

could be the key he needs to unlock the mysterious script.

After Alice dies, Ventris, now settled in Hampstead Heath,

North London, puts all his energy into completing the work

she started.

But unlike Alice, he's not just interested in discovering

how Linear B was written.

Ventris wants to understand how the lost language

was spoken.

So he creates his own grid, taking Alice's group symbols

and allocating potential sounds to them

based on nothing more than educated guesswork.

- Until you know the sound values,

you've no idea what language you are dealing with.

So the next critical step was to start trying to build up

a sense of the sounds of words in the tablets.

- [Narrator] Ventris knows that hearing Linear B

spoken out loud might just reveal whose language it was.

- It could be a language that had died on Crete

and was related to nothing subsequently

or it could be a language that's evolved over time

and was still used in some part of the ancient world.

- [Narrator] And the young architect from London

is about to be thrown an unexpected lifeline.

Arthur Evans spent the last 40 years of his life

pursuing the belief that Linear B was Minoan in origin

and unique to Crete.

But in 1951, details are published

of hundreds more ancient tablets

also inscribed with Linear B text.

But these tablets weren't found anywhere near Crete.

They were excavated a hundred miles away in Pylos

on the Greek mainland.

- These clay tablets at Pylos prove that the ones

that were at Knossos are not an exception

and that the same language that was being written in Pylos

is the same language as being written in Knossos.

[pensive music]

- [Narrator] The latest set of tablets are discovered

buried among the remains of the ancient palace of Nestor,

but it's not a Minoan palace.

It was built by the civilization that replaced them.

- Lo and behold.

Suddenly, here is a writing system that looks very much

the same as Linear B and it's cropped up outside of Crete

and enduring for a couple of centuries longer

than had been thought.

- Suddenly, we have to reevaluate everything

because if this is the Minoan language,

then why is it on mainland Greece

and why is it being used long after the Minoans

were using it?

- These two places, Crete and Pylos,

are speaking or at least writing in the same language.

Something doesn't make sense.

- [Narrator] Two ancient civilizations

separated by a hundred miles of the Mediterranean Sea

and hundreds of years,

both using the exact same writing system.

- The Pylos discovery was extremely important

for Michael Ventris' decipherment

because it gave him much more data.

- [Narrator] Ventris uses the new data to further add

to his grid.

And what he discovers will be the final key

to unlocking the lost language.

He identifies three sets of symbols that appear repeatedly

on clay fragments from Knossos,

but don't appear anywhere on any of the tablets from Pylos.

Ventris makes an educated guess that these three words

could be place names on ancient Crete.

- While languages change,

one thing that does stay consistent is a place name.

Place names that are present today often have names

that would've been somewhat similar in the past,

even the distant past.

- [Narrator] Ventris chooses one of the three sets

of symbols unique to the Cretan tablets

and adds them to his grid of potential sounds.

And the word it forms is strangely familiar.

This could be the ancient spelling of Amnisos,

a harbor town close to Knossos.

Ventris tentatively locks the sounds into his grid

and adds the second set of symbols.

The result is astonishing.

- Ko-no-so, Knossos,

the very place where the tablets had been found

at the start.

[upbeat suspenseful music]

- [Narrator] Half a century

after the tablets were discovered,

Michael Ventris has made the very first translation

of a fragment of Linear B text.

He then adds the third set of symbols to the grid

only to reveal Tulissos, another ancient Cretan town.

- Each new place name he unraveled gave him more data

to put in other cells of the grid.

So it was a chain reaction.

- So, you know now that all those vowels

and all those consonants can be projected onto other symbols

in the same row or in the same column.

- And once you get one or two of those values right,

you get a domino effect.

- [Narrator] For the first time in over 3,000 years,

the lost language of Linear B is coming to life.

The more connections Ventris makes,

the more obvious it becomes that Evans' obsession

to prove Linear B is Minoan

has been a 50-year wild goose chase.

It's only when spoken aloud that the truth is revealed

because Ventris recognizes the words he's now hearing.

Linear B isn't a record of some long lost Minoan language.

The words inscribed on the tablets

are a form of ancient Greek.

[suspenseful music]

Ventris' discovery rocks the academic world.

- This is impossible.

Nobody has ever suggested Linear B could be Greek.

This must be wrong.

- This mysterious looking symbolic language

all of a sudden became a real language

that had a real connection to the present

as well as the past.

- [Narrator] His discovery goes against everything

the experts thought they knew

about early Greek civilization.

- It was a revelation for scholars.

So it took a while for people

to accept Michael Ventris' discovery

that this is ancient Greek.

They didn't actually want to believe it.

- [Narrator] One cynic is John Chadwick,

a former World War II codebreaker and lecturer

in ancient Greek at Cambridge University, England.

- John was very skeptical

and he really did need to be convinced

that there was some solid foundation

before he would go along with it.

- [Narrator] Chadwick reluctantly looks into Ventris' theory

and he's astonished to discover Ventris has done

exactly what he claims.

He has unlocked the ancient script of Linear B.

- Michael Ventris wasn't expecting to find Greek

because nobody had ever expected to find Greek.

When he did find Greek,

he found someone who was qualified to tell him

he wasn't out of his mind,

that it really did look like Greek.

- [Narrator] Now totally convinced by Ventris' claims,

in 1952, Chadwick joins forces with him

to decode the rest of the language.

- It's this synergy that is so key in cracking a code.

And the two of them, over the next four years,

managed to come up with a fairly good decoding of Linear B.

- [Narrator] Deciphering the symbols

that had perplexed Arthur Evans and Alice Kober for decades

reveals words first used thousands of years ago,

many of which remain in use today.

- One of these words that we come across is the word demos

for the people.

And that is the kind of catch phrase of democracy

in the ancient world and this very idea of democracy

that still defines a lot of Western culture.

We can now trace the root of that word

back to a word in Linear B.

- [Narrator] Their work is groundbreaking.

But just weeks before they are due to publish

their historic findings,

the curse of Linear B strikes again.

- Unfortunately, it seems that tragedy strikes

a lot of these scholars.

Michael Ventris was in an unfortunate car accident

and he passed away right prior to the publication

of his monumental work.

- He drove out in his car alone late at night,

pulled into a rest area, a lay by, at high speed

and slammed into the back of a parked truck.

[tense upbeat music]

[car crashes]

He was killed instantly.

- [Narrator] Michael Ventris was just 34 when he died.

He devoted years building on the work of first, Arthur Evans

and then Alice Kober.

But his collaboration with John Chadwick proved undeniably

that Linear B was the first writing system

of the ancient Greeks.

- Prior to the discovery of Linear B,

effectively, we had a dark age.

We didn't know much about European Greek history

prior to the pre-classical period.

And so now, we have a light.

- It's been called by some the Everest of Greek archeology

because it's completely transformed

the way that we view Greek culture

and the way that we connect different parts of history.

- [Narrator] Before Linear B was cracked,

experts had assumed the first Greeks only communicated

by word of mouth.

Deciphering the ancient code

revealed they were far more sophisticated

than modern experts had assumed.

They had their own writing system,

centuries earlier than anyone had ever imagined.

- It's given us a real insight into everyday life

in the Bronze Age.

It's also given us a very different perspective

on the history of the Greek language.

- [Narrator] But while the language recorded by Linear B

has finally come to life,

thanks to almost 50 years of obsessive research,

the same is not true of Linear A,

the earlier version of the script discovered by Arthur Evans

at Knossos.

- It is a language that seems to influence Linear B.

The symbols are somewhat comparable or similar,

but what's also clear

is that we have now two different languages.

- If you applied Linear B type sound values

to Linear A signs,

you could say sort of what Linear A sounded like,

but it didn't sound or looked like Greek.

- [Narrator] To this day, the language of Linear A

remains uncracked.

Ironically, archeologists and linguists now believe

that Arthur Evans was, in part, correct.

Just as he'd theorized,

the Minoans did indeed have their own unique writing system,

but it was Linear A.

Sadly, Evans' attraction to the neatness and order

of Linear B distracted him from the true Minoan language.

- We can see that Linear A and Linear B

are very closely related to each other.

It must be that Greek speakers borrow Linear A,

makes some small adaptations to it,

but largely they pick it up and they use it

for their own language.

[pensive music]

- [Narrator] Linear A remained in use on Crete

until the first Greeks arrived around 1450 BC.

Over time, they became the dominant civilization,

but they took on much of the Minoan's advanced culture

and, ultimately, their pioneering writing system

to record a version of their language.

- Rather than starting from square one,

one of the cool things about taking over

a preexisting civilization is that you can build on top

of everything that they've already built.

- It wasn't a civilization that just burst onto the scene.

The ancient Greeks had a sort of process

where they developed their language slowly over time

and Linear B was that critical phase where written Greek

was developed for the first time.

- [Narrator] Arthur Evans, Alice Kober, and Michael Ventris

all devoted their lives to cracking Linear B

and their shared obsession with decoding a lost language

ultimately did so much more.

- Now, for the first time,

we know the Greek language derived from this civilization

that spoke and wrote ancient Greek.

- [Narrator] The decoding of Linear B

has revealed the earliest origins of the Greek civilization

and in turn, the very beginnings of today's modern society.

- It reshapes our vision of the Greek world

and where Greek culture came from.

- We can't overestimate really the importance

of these tablets.

They really effectively changed history.

[rousing music]

[dramatic upbeat music]