Linear B

Linear B is the name given to the script used in Mycenaean Greece from 1450 BC until around 1200 BC. It was deciphered in 1952 by the British architect, Michael Ventris, who found it to be based on archaic Greek. What is not generally known is that in America at the same time, classicist Alice Kober was engaged in a parallel quest but unfortunately died of cancer in 1950, before she could complete her work^(b).

Edo Nyland in his Linguistic Archaeology controversially claimed that the same texts translated by Ventris using archaic Greek could also be translated using Basque! Examples are given on the University of California, Riverside website^(c).

The script is similar to Linear A^(a) used in Minoan Crete, which has still to be decoded. Writing disappeared from Greece in the 12^th cent. BC and did not reappear until the 9^th cent. BC, when an alphabetic script came into use. Those three centuries are known as the ‘Dark Ages’ of Greek history. Plato explained the lack of writing as a consequence of a catastrophic flood which left just a few illiterate ‘mountaineers’ as survivors, who orally transmitted their history until literacy returned.

The scale of Greek catastrophes during this period is indicated by the work of V.R.Desborough^[908][909] who gathered comparative data on the number of population centres on the Peloponnese in the 12^th and 13^th centuries that shows an average drop of 80%. Spanuth lists those figures in Atlantis of the North^[015.161].

Plato is often denounced by Atlantic sceptics as just a philosopher and therefore unreliable as a historian. However, in Critias, he outlines quite accurately a number of features of ancient Greece that were only verified in recent times, such as the layout and earthquake damage to the Acropolis as well as the ‘Dark Ages’ mentioned above. This is like saying that a historian cannot have valid philosophical views or a philosopher should not discuss historical matters.

It has been suggested that the Atlantis story was brought to Egypt and written in the Minoan scripts. Both employed numerals where the symbol for ‘hundred’ was very similar to that for ‘thousand’, leading to later transcription errors that eventually gave us Plato’s apparently exaggerated numbers! Both James Mavor and Rodney Castleden have advocated this explanation.

>The relevant entry in the World History Encyclopedia offers an informative overview of what we know about Linear B^(d).<

^(a) https://jarnaes.wordpress.com/1-minoan-crete-linear-a/

^(b) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620

^(c) https://web.archive.org/web/20190605060214/https://faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/bronze/linerb.htm

^(d) Linear B Script – World History Encyclopedia *