Chadwick J.(1967), Greekless Archaeology

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ANTIQUITY, LI, 1967

Greekless Archaeologyby JOHN CHADWICK

When, in 1961, Sinclair Hood contributedhis chapter to The Dawn of Civilization edited byStu ar t Piggott) he wrote n 1952Michael VentriS in England came forward with the claimtha t the language [of the Linear B tablets] was Greek. His decipherment has won acceptancefrom many authorities, although it is seriously challenged by others. The solution of thiscontroversy is perhaps the most important singl issue in Aegean prehistoric studies at themoment. Th is chapter has now been reissued as a book under the title of The Home of theHeroes: the Aegean before the Greeks London, Thaws and Huhon, 1967. I pp.,123 diagrams, photographs and tables, 30s. ; and here Hood writes of the Ventrisdeciphermentthat it has been widely accepted; but i t is seriously chullenged, and the language of the Linear Btablets may not be Greek at all. John Chadwick, Reader in the Greek Languaxe n theUniversity of Cambridge and Fellow of Downing College, is the name that, after Ventris,springs to mind whenever there s discussion of Linear B. n this article-the provocative titleis his own-he reviews Sinclair Hoods book wit h special reference to the most importantsingle issue in Aegean prehistoric studies, and argues that i t is not possible to believe that thelanguage of the tablets i s other than Greek.

N the 15 years since the decipherment of theI o-called Linear B script as Greek, I haveoften been asked what was the most importantresulting gain in our knowledge of ancientGreece. I have always put first the final andconclusive proof that the Mycenaeans, thepeople who produced a brilliant civilization inGreece between the 16th and 12th centuriesBC, were Greeks. Previously there had alwaysbeen room for argument, and although mostpeople accepted this as a fact, it was always justpossible to assert that the Mycenaeans were anon-Greek people, whose deeds and legendshad been appropriated by the Greeks as theirown.It is surprising at this late hour to find the oldargument reopened by a notable archaeologist,Mr Sinclair Hood, in a book recently publishedunder the title: The Home of the Heroes: the

E.g. [I] His attempts at criticizing the texts ofeditions of the Knossos tablets z] have been shownup as largely worthless; see [3]. His preconceptionsabout the script have led him into epigraphic errors.

Aegean before the Greeks. It is an admirableaccount of what is still known to the experts asPre-Hellenic archaeology, the archaeologicalhistory of Greece down to 1 BC Mr Hood,who was formerly Director of the British Schoolat Athens, is an expert on Minoan Crete, wherehe has conducted digs; and his account of thearchaeology of the Aegean in this period is alucid summary. But, as the title advertises, ithas one major flaw, and the purpose of thisarticle is to examine the reasons for this,and to suggest why Mr Hoods reconstructionof the history is wrong on one vital point.

Mr Hood has come, as he admits, under theinfluence of an elderly German, ProfessorErnst Grumach of Berlin. Now Grumach, as hehas shown by a long series of articles andreviews,* had made up his mind about thenature of the Minoan scripts before the lastThat his views have hardly changed is evident froman interview published in the Greek newspaper Vimaof 24.5.66. Grumach died in October 1967, fterthis article was written.


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war. He believed, with Evans, that the scriptwas largely ideographic; that Linear A andLinear B were merely orthographic variants of asingle system used for the same language; andthat the Greeks only entered Greece after theend of the Mycenaean period. Grumach wastherefore hostile to the demonstration byMichael Ventris in 952 that Linear B wasbasically a syllabic script, that it was used fora language different from that of Linear A, andthat its language was an early form of Greek.He could not by any stretch of the imaginationbe called unprejudiced, and it is small wonderthat he has continued to oppose the ever-growing evidence which supports the con-clusions of Ventris, evidence which hasconvinced competent and unprejudiced Greekscholars throughout the world. What is surpris-ing is that he should have had a followingamong archaeologists, though, as we shall see,there is a good reason for that.Let us for the moment forget the Ventrisdecipherment, let us assume that Linear B isstill a mystery, and see what follows. We knowthat the Mycenaean civilization was theculmination of a process of development whichbegan about the beginning of the MiddleHelladic period, around the 20th centuryBC; and that this was violently destroyed in itsvarious centres towards the end of the 13thand during the 12th centuries. Subsequently,but not immediately, a new population enteredsouthern Greece, apparently from the north-west, and in classical times provided thedominant class of the population in most of theareas which had been flourishing centres ofMycenaean civilization. Crete, however, has aseparate history; its palaces were all destroyedin the 15th century, and although some were re-built, the age of Minoan splendour was past,except for a strange period in which Knossosflourished briefly, apparently at the expense ofthe other cities of Crete, but succumbed to aviolent catastrophe and thereafter the generallevel of culture in the island was rather lower.Into this picture we can introduce facts aboutwriting, bu t -on our present assumption-notlanguage. Crete has its script from at least the18th century BC; but it is barely found outside

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Crete-perhaps a few specimens from Cretancolonies-and disappears abruptly in the 15thcentury. A different, but related, script is foundin the Mycenaean centres of the mainland,Mycenae, Thebes and Pylos, and in Crete atKnossos in its brief period of hegemony at theend of the 15th or early 14th century. Mr Hoodquite rightly has nothing to do with ProfessorL. R Palmers theory that the date of theKnossos tablets should be brought down to the12th century [4].The question whether the language of the twoscripts is the same is difficult to answer defi-nitely, but such evidence as there is pointsstrongly to a difference. Both scripts have atotalling formula, signs regularly used tointroduce a summation of preceding numerals;they are completely different. No words of anylength seem to be identical in the two scripts,and some resemblances can easily be accountedfor, whatever the nature of the script, by thesupposition that some proper names survivedthe change of language. The metric system ofthe later script is quite different. Thus there isthe probability that about the 15th centuryKnossos at least experienced a change in thelanguage of its inhabitants, and the newlanguage then introduced was that which in thesucceeding period was widespread in southernGreece.It is obvious that there is no direct way ofdetermining the language of a people of the past,unless we possess, and can read, their writtendocuments. Thus, if we regard Linear B asundeciphered, we cannot hope to knowdirectly what languages were spoken in Greecebefore the historic period. But there are severalindirect, and therefore less reliable, methods bywhich we can proceed. If we can establish thelanguage of a place at a given date, and there isno trace of any break or intrusion of new ele-ments into the archaeological record for somecenturies before that date, it is usually safe toinfer that the language had been establishedthere all the while; but of course we must besure of the archaeological facts. This will nothelp us to determine the language of MycenaeanGreece, because it is separated from classicalGreece by several centuries of near-barbarism,


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GREEK LESS ARCHAEOLOGYas profound a cultural gulf as one can wellimagine.

Another method is the study of place-names.It is well known that place-names frequentlystart by havinga meaning, but subsequently liveon for centuries, even for millennia, long afterthe language in which they had a meaning isdead and gone. The Roman occupation ofBritain, which ended more than I , oo years ago,has left its mark on English place-names. Thusif we could identify the language which pro-duced the place-names of Greece we couldinfer something about its early history. Most ofthe classical names are not Greek; but we do notknow the language-or languages, for there isno reason to assign them all to a single origin-in which they once had meaning. Nor is thereany certain way of dating such place-names,though it was shown long ago that many ofthese early names belonged to sites which hadfirst been settled in the Early Helladic period 151So all that we can deduce from this is that theGreek language came to Greece after 2000 BCMr Hood is on dangerous ground in ascribingall these names to the Neolithic inhabitants;though parallels do suggest that they probablydid not all belong to the same language, and afew might be Neolithic in origin.

Mr Hood rightly accepts the Hittite evidencethat the name the Mycenaeans gave themselveswas that familiar from Homer, Akhai w)oi,or Achaeans. But he draws from it the extra-ordinary inference that because it is notsignificant in Greek, the Achaeans were notGreeks; as if all peoples referred to themselvesbynames significant in their own language. I canthink of a few cases where this is true: theDutch may call themselves lowlanders, theChinese central kingdom people but themajority of national names are meaningless asvocabulary words. Strangely, Mr Hood hasforgotten that the classical, post-Homeric, namefor the Greeks, Hellenes is equally meaningless.This is an argument which proves nothing.

But it does lead us to Homer. Mr Hood nevermakes explicit his attitude to the Homericpoems. Are they history or fiction? If they aretruly historical, or even if they are merely goodhistorical fiction, they must contain a great deal

of fact. For instance, we can hardly conceivethat, unless the poems are totally fiction, thenames of the principal characters, such asPatroklos, Menelaos, Diomedes or Telemakhos,are invented; yet all these names are pureGreek, with obvious meanings. This argumentlooks a strong one in favour of the Greekness ofthe Mycenaeans, provided we ascribe theTrojan war to this period, until we notice thatGreek names occur as freely among theTrojans. Hektor, Andromakhe and Astyanaxare all pure Greek. In other words the traditionconceived all the main contestants in the Trojanwar as Greek-speaking, and only some of theTrojan allies are specifically said to speak aforeign language. But this does not prove thespeech of the originals of these characters, anymore than we can draw conclusions from Antonyand Cleopatra speaking English in Shakespearesplay; but we should be surprised if either of theprincipal characters had names which weresignificant in English.Thus we have a dilemma: either the traditionis wholly false, in which case it is remarkablethat Homers geography coincidesso closely withthe political geography of Mycenaean Greece asreconstructed by archaeology; or the traditionis correct in essentials, and among these wemust include the names of the chief characters.It is easier to believe that the Trojans wereGreek-speaking, at least Hellenized like theclassical Macedonians, than to accept thetradition of the Trojan war as a completefiction. That many, perhaps most, of the detailsare fictitious can easily be conceded; but thefact remains that the classical Greeks regardedthe heroes who fought at Troy as their ancestorsin a very real sense.Even so, there is still room for a reallyhardened sceptic. But will Mr Hoods recon-struction of the events of 1200 800 BC holdwater? He supposes that the Mycenaeanssuccumbed to attacks by speakers of East Greekto use a convenient technical term whichMr Hood eschews); and that they werefollowed within a century or Ijo years at themost by speakers of West Greek dialects, orDorians. What he does not explain is whatarchaeological trace there is of the East Greeks

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A N T I Q U I T Yin the later Dorian areas. For instance, Mycen-aean Messenia was densely populated, but after1200 C became virtually deserted: where thenwere the ancestors of the Athenian familieswho claimed descent from the royal house ofMessenia?It would take too long to discuss allthis in detail, and it has been admirably done byMr Vincent Desborough in his book The Lastycenaeum and their Successors Oxford, 1964 .But it is clear that Mr Hoods theory is verylame at this point.

The death blow was dealt to this theory by thedecipherment of the Linear B tablets as a formof Greek. As Mr Hood remarks, the reasons forand against the decipherment are essentiallyphilological, that is, linguistic; and any argu-ment about languages must be philological inthis sense. I do not quarrel with Mr Hood quaarchaeologist, though his historical conclusionsseem to me sometimes inadequate; but heexplicitly declines to fight on the one groundwhich is really relevant, and takes refuge behinda single known opponent of the Ventrisdecipherment. I have argued the case philo-logically elsewhere at length [6]; here is noneed to repeat these arguments here for theyhave become stronger as the passage of time hasincreased our knowledge of the Linear B scriptand its language. If professorial heads areto be counted, I have on my side dozens ofeminent names.A recent article by another German scholar,Dr H. Geiss, reveals the unspoken axiom onwhich most of the critics of the deciphermentrely: no bilingual, no decipherment [7]. This wastrue up to the decipherment of Linear B ; anunknown script and an unknown language werethought insoluble until Ventris brilliantlydemonstrated the contrary. Those of coursewith experience of certain cryptographicmethods have long been aware of the fact thatcribs are unnecessary, given sufficient materialto study; and this kind of cryptography can bepractised without knowing the language in-volved, since it proceeds directly from the cryp-tic form to the meaning. It is in fact the pro-cedure by which the meaning of obscure termsin any ancient text is educed: the comparison ofnumerous examples until the only possible

meaning which suits all contexts is found. Thiscan also be applied to common words in anunknown language, and is the method by whichnearly all the certain interpretations of Etruscanwords have been achieved.The truth is that the Greekness of Linear Bhas been accepted by the leading experts on theGreek language; it has not so easilycommendeditself to those who lack this knowledge, for theyare not in a good position to judge argumentswhich are essentiallyphilological.The spectacleof a small band of scholars clinging desperatelyto outmoded prejudices in the face of worldopinion would be pathetic, were it not that theiropposition is hampering the advance ofknowledge, just as astronomy was once ham-pered by theological dogma.

There is one further flaw in Mr Hoodspresentation. He states correctly that the climateof opinion in 1952 avoured the view that theMycenaeans spoke Greek, and questions myassertion that the demonstration that LinearB was Greek came as a shock. This is a curiousmisunderstanding. The shock was the realiza-tion that Knossos in its culminating phase spokeGreek; this was something only a few boldthinkers like the late Professor A. J. B. Wacehad suggested; almost everyone was still underthe spell of Evanss Minoanism. As I havepointed out before, it ought not to have been ashock, because it was evident that Knossos andPyloswrote the same language, and it was hardto believe that a Greek-speaking monarchwhether his name was Nestor or not) kept hisaccounts in a foreign language.

We can now reconstruct the outlines of Greekhistory between 2000 and 800 BC. About the20th century a band of invaders entered Greeceand in due course made themselves masters ofthe mainland. They were not Greeks; but theyspoke an Indo-European language, which as aresult of mixing with an earlier unknownlanguage emerged as Greek. They copied thehigher arts of civilization from Minoan Crete;the Minoans ruled the seas and maintainedcolonies in various parts of the Aegean. Onlyafter the cataclysmic eruption of Thera in the15th century did the Mycenaean Greekssucceed in occupying Crete. For a short while

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GREEK LESS ARCHAEOLOGYthey ruled the whole island from Knossos; butthe centrifugal tendencies soon reasserted them-selves, and Crete fell apart into a number ofpetty states.

What caused the Mycenaean collapse is stilluncertain; but it can hardly be an accident thatthis is the period when Egypt recorded thedefeat of two major attempts to invade herterritory by a mysterious force called thePeoples of the Sea. The consequence of thecollapse of Mycenaean power was a vacuum;only a small population survived, and this wasconcentrated for defence in a few areas likeEastern Attica. In the 11th century the DorianGreeks, who had remained in the north-westfar from the civilizing influence of Crete, beganto move south into the rich empty lands, and

thus to establish the pattern of classical Greece.As the survivors of the Mycenaeans grew innumbers again, they were unable to return totheir former homes, and were forced to emi-grate, thus starting the process of colonization,at first in Ionia, and later in many other parts ofthe ancient world.

This is a reconstruction that seems to me, andto many others, far more plausible than thatoffered by Mr Hood. Much more remains to belearned, and we need the services of archaeo-logists like Mr Hood to provide the facts aboutmaterial life; but when it comes to questions oflanguage, would not the archaeologist do betterto engage the services of a competent guide inorder to penetrate the labyrinth of the Minoanscripts?

N O T E S[I] Ovientalistische Literuturzeitung,111 1957, 293; London, 2nd. ed. 1965 ; ANTIQUITY 1964, 45.

[ ] J B. Haley andC W. Blegen,AJA, xxx11,1928,[2] Kudmos, 11, 1963, 156; cf. Gnomon; XXXVIII, [6] See my Decipherment of Lineur B Cambridge,[3] J. Chadwick and J. T. Killen, Klio, XLVI, 1965, [7] H. Geiss, Untersuchungen zur Ventrisschen[4] See L. R. Palmer, Mycmeuns and Minoons

Gnomon, XXXII 1960,681.1966, 809.93.

141.1958, 2nd. ed. 1967 .Entzifferung, Klio, LXVIII, 1967, 5

Book ChronicleW e include here books which ha ve been received fo r r m k w , or books of importance not receivedfor review, of which we have recently been informed. We welcome information about books,particularly in languages other than English or American, of interest to readers of ANTIQUITY.The listing of a book in this chronicle does not preclude it s review in ANTIQUITY.

Les Temples dIshtarat et de Ninni-ZazabyAndre Parrot with Georges Dossin andLucienne Laroche. Paris: Libraire OrientalistePaul Geuthner, 1967. 354 p p . , 8 4 pls., 348 jigs.Frs. 120 This is Vol. 111 of the MissionArchkologique de Mari, forming Vol. LXXXVIof the Bibliothhque archiologique et historiqueof the Institut francais darchblog ie de Beyrouth.The English Village Community and theEnclosure Movements by W. E. Tate.London Victor Gdl anc z, 1967 . 231 pp., 14pl s . ,1 6 figs. 42s. By the Reader in HistoricalSources in the University of Leeds.

Oman. History by Wendell Phillips. London:Longmans, Green, 1967 .246pp . , 24pls . , z maps.63s.

La Prbhistoire de LEurope by SigfriedJ. DeLaet. Brussels: Editions Meddens, 1967. 212pp. including 5 colour pb., 387 photographs,36 j igs . , 8 maps. None of these is listed:captions under photographs include sources,but mainly an unhelpful one word Archives.B . Frs. 695.Western Political Thought by ChristopherMorris. London: Longmans Green, 1967. 282p p . 42s. The fi st volumeof three by Mr Morris.This one is sub-titled Plat0 to Augustine.The Traditional Crafts of Persia by Hans E.Wulff. Cambridge, Ma ss. an d London, England:The M.I.T. Press, 1966. 405 pp. including 423illustrations, I map. EIO

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Chadwick J.(1967), Greekless Archaeology

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