Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Kydonia,[4] Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae,[5] disappeared with the fall of Mycenaean civilization during the Late Bronze Age collapse.

Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris[6] based on the research of American classicist Alice Kober.

[9] In the handwriting of all the thousands of clay tablets, a relatively small number of scribes have been detected: 45 in Pylos (west coast of the Peloponnese, in Southern Greece) and 66 in Knossos (Crete).

After the third meeting in 1961 at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin, a standard proposed primarily by Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. became known as the Wingspread Convention, which was adopted by a new organization, the Comité International Permanent des Études Mycéniennes (CIPEM: Permanent International Committee of Mycenaean Studies), affiliated in 1970 by the fifth colloquium with UNESCO.

[13] The grid developed during decipherment by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick of phonetic values for syllabic signs is shown below.

Clarification of the 14 or so special values tested the limits of the grid model, but Chadwick eventually concluded that even with the ramifications, the syllabic signs can unexceptionally be considered monosyllabic.

[19] Possible exceptions, Chadwick goes on to explain, include the two diphthongs, 𐁁 (ai) and 𐁂 (au), as in 𐁁𐀓𐀠𐀴𐀍, ai-ku-pi-ti-jo, for Aiguptios (Αἰγύπτιος, "Egyptian") and 𐁂𐀐𐀷, au-ke-wa, for Augewās (Αὐγείας "Augeas").

Diphthongs are otherwise treated as two monosyllables: 𐀀𐀫𐀄𐀨, a-ro-u-ra, for arourans (accusative plural of ἄρουραι, "tamarisk trees"), of the types CV and V.[20] Lengths of vowels and accents are not marked.

In Mycenaean they are /kʷ/, /gʷ/, and rarely /kʷh/ in names and a few words:[23] a-pi-qo-ro for amphiquoloi (ἀμφίπολοι); qo-u-ko-ro for guoukoloi (βουκόλοι, "cowherders"); qa-si-re-u for guasileus (βασιλεύς, "basileus", meaning in this period "court official or local chieftain"), -qo-i-ta for -φόντης.

The j-series represents the semivowel equivalent to English "y", and is used word-initially and as an intervocalic glide after a syllable ending in i: -a-jo for -αῖος (-aios); a-te-mi-ti-jo for Ἀρτεμίτιος (Artemitios).

[68] An amber seal incised with Linear B signs was found in 2000 by amateur archaeologists at Bernstorf near Kranzberg, southern Germany, and is of much debated authenticity.

Most notably, Blegen said that the inscribed stirrup jars, which are oil flasks with stirrup-shaped handles imported from Crete around 1200, were of the same type as those dated by Evans to the destruction of 1400.

[80] For example, Plutarch gives an account of the Spartan king Agesilaus II (r. 400–360 BC) sending a bronze tablet with "many letters marvellously old, for nothing could be made of them" to Egyptian priests in the hope they could understand them.

[81] The British archaeologist Arthur Evans, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, was presented by Greville Chester in 1886 with a sealstone from Crete engraved with a writing he took to be Mycenaean.

Subsequently, he found more stones from the various ruins being worn by Cretan women as amulets called γαλόπετρες "milk-stones", thought to encourage the production of breast milk.

[84] Starting in 1894, Evans published his theories that the signs evidenced various phases in the development of a writing system in The Journal of Hellenic Studies, the first article being "Primitive Pictographs and a Prae-Phoenician Script from Crete".

He did not explicitly define these terms, causing some confusion among subsequent writers concerning what he meant, but in 1898 he wrote[86] "These linear forms indeed consist of simple geometrical figures which unlike the more complicated pictorial class were little susceptible to modification," and "That the linear or quasi-alphabetic signs ... were in the main ultimately derived from the rudely scratched line pictures belonging to the infancy of art can hardly be doubted."

According to Evans's report to the British School at Athens for that year,[89] on 5 April, the excavators discovered the first large cache ever of Linear B tablets among the remains of a wooden box in a disused terracotta bathtub.

Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1900,[91] notes that Evans took up Stillman's theme that the palace was the labyrinth of mythology in which the half-bovine son of King Minos lurked.

The years after 1900 were consumed by excavations at Knossos and the discovery and study by Evans of tablets, with a projected comprehensive work on Cretan scripts to be called Scripta Minoa.

In Scripta Minoa I,[92] which appeared in 1909, he explained that the discovery of the Phaistos Disc in July 1908 had caused him to pull the book from the presses so that he could include the disk by permission, as it had not yet been published.

On the next page[93] he mentioned that he was also including by permission of Federico Halbherr of the Italian Mission in Crete unpublished tablets from Hagia Triada written in a linear script of "Class A".

Stawell declared all three Cretan script forms to represent early Homeric Greek, and offered her attempts at translations.

[99] In 1949, Bedřich Hrozný published Les Inscriptions Crétoises, Essai de déchiffrement, a proposed decipherment of the Cretan scripts.

About the same time, Alice Kober studied Linear B and managed to construct grids, linking similar symbols in groups of threes.

Kober's systematic approach allowed her to demonstrate the existence of three grammatical cases and identify several pairs of signs that shared vowels or consonants with one another.

Working alongside fellow academic Alice Kober, by 1950 Bennett had deciphered the metrical system, based on his intensive study of Linear B tablets unearthed at Pylos.

[109][110] After wartime service as a navigator with RAF Bomber Command, and a post-war year in Occupied Germany, he returned to civilian life, and completed qualification as an architect.

"[112] Ventris' discovery was of significance in demonstrating a Greek-speaking Minoan-Mycenaean culture on Crete, and thus presenting Greek in writing centuries earlier than had been previously accepted.

But we must not resort to "non-Greek" whenever we come up against an insoluble problem.The first edition of their book, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, was published in 1956, shortly after Ventris's death in an automobile accident.