All language subtitles for Cracking.The.Code.S01E04.720p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-Kitsune.[eng]

[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]