Secret codes, dead languages, faction jargons or caste sabir: this series focuses on decoding obscure languages from yesterday to today. Today: the deciphering of very, very ancient Greek.
What is the greatest invention in history? In 2000, the magazine’s readership Times had chosen the light bulb as the greatest creation of the completed millennium. Not crazy.
Professor Anne-France Morand, from the Department of Historical Sciences at Laval University, posed the question this year to her Modern Greek class. She heard her students cite the wheel, the bridge, and other marvels.
“I said that the most important thing was to decipher Linear B. Everyone laughed at me,” says the Hellenist, laughing herself at her joke.
Linear B is a syllabic writing system used during the Late Bronze Age in ancient Greece, between 1450 and 1100 BCE. The first traces of this syllabary written on pottery and clay tablets were discovered in Crete on the site of an ancient palace complex excavated from 1900 by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans (1851-1941).
It took half a century to crack this code. Using analytical lists by philologist Alice Kober (1906-1950) showing that the final letter of certain words changed, linguist Michael Ventris (1922-1956), obsessed with Linear B since adolescence, was able to to conclude that this writing served an Indo-European language with declensions, in fact an archaic Greek spoken by the Mycenaeans.
This syllabary system, however, has no connection with the Greek alphabet which replaced it. It is based on 87 signs translating syllables and others representing ideas or decimal numbers. The deciphered tablets mainly deal with administrative, economic and religious matters. The texts give an idea of the daily life of this very distant time. They also make it possible to follow the roots of the civilization so important for the continuation of things in the West.
“During my studies, I had the chance to do linear B, says Professor Morand. Deciphering it is quite an incredible affair since there was no bilingual text, no Rosetta Stone. This language is quite deciphered now. We understand for example that “Knossos” is written conosso. We have the word for “labyrinth”: mazes. We also know that the words in “issos” or in “ithos” are very Greek, and we therefore find the equivalent of dinosaurs in this language in Linear B. But for several other words, we have several interpretations. It remains a problem. »
Linear A, discovered at Knossos at the same time as Linear B, at the beginning of the 20th centurye century, by Sir Arthur Evans, proposes another writing system, this time going back to the Bronze Age, between 1900 and 1450 before our era. This code therefore precedes Linear B and is not strictly syllabic. Linear A includes signs representing syllables, but also ideograms and logograms. This system is always resistant to decryption.
“A lot of linguists are interested in it,” says the professor. The lack of inscriptions — only a few thousand characters and often short texts — poses a challenge. If we found longer texts, we might be able to crack this code. The other challenge is that we seem to be dealing with a language that we don’t understand, perhaps not Indo-European. »
This index recalls the complexity of the settlement of the region. “The Greeks thought they were natives, but they weren’t,” sums up the specialist.
A youthful passion
Professor Anne-France Morand was joined by The duty in Europe, where she searches libraries for manuscripts of Orphic hymns, texts linked to the myth of Orpheus and to an initiatory religious current, a subject on which she has been working patiently since her doctoral thesis. She was in Paris a few weeks ago to work on a manuscript from the XVe century.
“There is not much time right now for the slow science, she says. I do a fairly meticulous job that requires me to collate about fifty manuscripts. This work has not been done for the Orphic Hymns since 1941.”
Professor Morand teaches ancient Greek at the Institute of Ancient and Medieval Studies at Université Laval. In his hyper-specialized field, one must master epigraphy (reading stones), papyrology (for papyri) and paleography (reading medieval manuscripts on parchment or on paper). She herself was highly trained in these specialties in Oxford with the authority Nigel Wilson, whom she designates as “the best living paleographer”.
She began studying Latin at the age of 12, then that of Greek at age 15 in a Swiss public secondary school, the Calvin College in Geneva, which continues this tradition today as part of the maturity gymnasiale, the equivalent of the French baccalaureate.
“I was destined for law,” she explains. I finished my legal studies, I taught law and, at one point, I had to admit that my great passion was Greek. I have an almost mystical connection with this language. Very young, around 14, I also had a passion for Etruscan, another language still misunderstood. »
In recent years, she has studied the Cypriot syllabary, a 56-character script dating from the Iron Age (11e at IVe century before our era), which probably derives from Linear A and B. It is from the Greek which was deciphered in the XIXe century. The Quebec professor recently studied a tablet of Ve century for physicians. “It’s difficult because of the signs and the Cypriot dialect. I’m getting there, but it’s complicated. »
Ancient Greek literature produced over more than a millennium is mostly digitized and available online. Still need to be able to read it. Digital translation systems are starting to get there. Computers filter an enormous amount of data.
Linear A is not the only ancient language to resist contemporary decryptors, aided or not by artificial intelligence, often because the spoken language that should provide the reading key has disappeared. The Cypro-Minoan (or Linear C) syllabary, also dating from the Bronze Age, exists on about 250 tablets, giving some 2500 signs, too few for decipherment.
Professor Morand recalls the case of the famous Voynich manuscript, which always rejects the entry of cryptographers. “There is a forest of ancient languages and some still resist us…”