14/10/2020

In Folha, Viana discusses the writings of European antiquity.

Palácio de Minos Knossos em Creta, Grécia. Foto: Wikimedia Commons.

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S.Paulo.

May 1953 was an extraordinary month. Mountaineers Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reached the summit of Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth, for the first time. The journal Nature published an article by scientists Francis Crick and James Watson proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. And architect Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B script, perhaps the oldest in Europe, used in Crete and Greece in the second millennium BC.

Athletic feats, scientific advances, discoveries of ancient writings: of the three types of human progress, the last is the rarest. The first major ancient language to be deciphered was Egyptian, Demotic and Hieroglyphic. These were followed, still in the 19th century, by the main languages of Mesopotamia: Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian, Akkadian, and Sumerian.

In the first half of the 20th century, it was the turn of some European and Middle Eastern scripts: Hittite, Olamite, and Linear B. Then, in the 1970s, the discovery of Mayan glyphs showed that the New World had also developed extremely sophisticated writing and language systems. But many writings from the past remain undeciphered, their symbols mysteriously silent.

Homer wrote in the Odyssey: “There is a land called Crete, situated in the wine-colored sea, beautiful and fertile, surrounded by the ocean. Its inhabitants are innumerable, and there are ninety cities within it. Its population speaks many languages. Among its cities is the powerful Knossos, whose king was Minos, who every nine years consulted with Zeus himself.”

Two and a half millennia later, in 1900, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans (1851–1941) excavated the ruins of Knossos in northern Crete, discovering the "palace of Minos" with its famous labyrinth, home to the Minotaur, a monster half-man and half-bull. In the following decades, Evans spent his family fortune reconstructing the palace as he saw fit…

He was the one who observed that the texts found in the palace used three types of writing, which he called Linear A, Linear B, and hieroglyphic, and he spent 40 years of his life trying to decipher them. Progress was modest, partly due to his insistence that the texts were in a "Minoan" language about which nothing was known.

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