A Brill Calendar: September 6

Few superb scholars die when young.

If the saying that the gods welcome in their midst those whom they love most dearly is true, the denizens of Mount Olympus can’t be said to love scholarship and learning greatly: William Shakespeare’s Lear is right, of course – ‘ripeness is all’ – but those fruits are usually associated with the autumn of a scholar’s years. It is seldom, that they sport the youthful grace of early life.

By the same token, the scholar who in 1952 deciphered the ‘Linear B’ script of ancient – pre-Greek – Minoan civilization was an exceptional phenomenon. Since its discovery around the year 1900 at Knossos, Crete, by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans the (1851-1941); pictographic language had resisted conclusive interpretation. The historic paper, ‘Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives’, (1953) co-authored by the English Cambridge linguist John Chadwick, was published by Michael Ventris (Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire July 12 1922 – near Hatfield, Hertfordshire, September 6 1957).

Ventris’ study as an architect had been interrupted by his service in the Royal Air Force during the World War: a dashing young man if there ever was one. Michael Ventris died in a motor-car accident in the county of his birth, aged 35; when he was 14 he had been the youngest listener to the great Sir Arthur himself. A few weeks after the crash, Ventris and Chadwicks ‘Documents in Mycenaean Greek’ came off the press; one year later followed by Chadwick’s ‘The Decipherment of Linear B’ Every so often, the gods of scholarship are pleasantly surprised.