Benveniste, Dumézil, Lejeune and the decipherment of Linear B

In April 1956, at Gif-sur-Yvette just outside of Paris, the first meeting of the International Colloquium on Mycenaean texts took place. The proceedings of the conference, edited by Michel Lejeune, were published later that year as Études mycéniennes: Actes du Colloque international sur les textes mycéniens (Gif-sur-Yvette, 3-7 avril 1956). Just a few years before, in 1952, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick had deciphered Linear B, a early script which precedes the Greek alphabet, and the texts in Linear B give a first sense of the Greek language, a few hundred years before Homer. Alice Kober did earlier foundational studies of this script, which Ventris and Chadwick used in their work (see for example here, here and here). But Kober died in 1950, at the age of just 43, and did not live to see the publications of Ventris and Chadwick.

In one of his two 1953-54 courses at the Collège de France, Georges Dumézil discussed the work of Ventris and Chadwick, a couple of years before the publication of their Documents in Mycenaean Greek, which was completed in 1955. Given the date, I think Dumézil must have been using “Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives”, published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1953. Some slides of the alphabet, possibly used by him in this course, are in his archives in Paris. The importance of this work was acknowledged by Emile Benveniste too, who recognised in a 1968 interview that the Mycenaean texts “draw back the prehistory of Greek by some five hundred years”. He discusses the script in, for example, his 1968-69 Collège de France course published in Last Lectures.

Benveniste and Dumézil both attended the Gif-sur-Yvette conference, along with Ventris and Chadwick, and a range of other French and European academics. The history of the conferences (at the Wayback Machine) says that Pierre Chantraine organised the event with Lejeune. Chantraine had been a student of Antoine Meillet, alongside Benveniste, in the 1920s. There is a photo of them all at the start of the volume. Benveniste takes part in the discussions, but neither he nor Dumézil gave a formal paper.

The participants in the 1956 Gif-sur-Yvette conference, taken from *Études mycéniennes*

Key to the photograph of the participants in the 1956 Gif-sur-Yvette conference, taken from *Études mycéniennes* (name of the dog not provided)

It was the first of a series of such conferences but the only one attended by Ventris. Five months later he died in a car crash, aged just 34. Documents in Mycenaean Greek was published a few weeks after his death, and Chadwick produced an expanded second edition in 1973. As well as several papers on Mycenaean texts, the conference also set up a working group and passed a series of resolutions outlining plans for collaborative work and setting out an agenda for future study. All these texts are included in the volume Lejeune edited, which is dedicated to Ventris. How much more Ventris would have done had he lived is unclear. Reports suggest that once he had cracked the code, further work on the language did not interest him nearly as much. A technical account of the work of Ventris and Chadwick is found in the opening chapters of Documents in Mycenaean Greek, but a more readable account is Chadwick’s 1958 book The Decipherment of Linear B, which tells the story for a wider audience. There, Chadwick provides an account of Ventris’s work before they started to work together, in which he regularly acknowledges the work of Kober. The Ventris-Chadwick correspondence is in Cambridge, and parts are online, including their initial letters to each other; the Ventris papers are at the Institute of Classical Studies in London and the University of Texas at Austin. Austin also has Kober’s archives.

Ventris’s story has been told, not just by Chadwick, but notably by Andrew Robinson in The Man who Deciphered Linear B, and Kober’s work has been explored by Margalit Fox in The Riddle of the Labyrinth, but I think there is less about the French connection to this story. Although both Benveniste and Dumézil acknowledge the importance of this work, neither seems to have been much involved after this 1956 event. Lejeune, however, was part of the International Committee on the language. Lejeune was also a student of Meillet, and from 1954 had been teaching on Mycenaean. He would publish extensively on the language. Lejeune connects to Benveniste’s story in several ways. He was the nominal second-rank candidate when Benveniste was elected to the Collège de France in 1937, succeeding Meillet; Benveniste and Lejeune were colleagues at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in comparative grammar; and Lejeune worked with Mohammad Djafar Moïnfar in compiling the second volume of Benveniste’s Problèmes de linguistique générale in 1974. In The Decipherment of Linear B Chadwick says that Dumézil’s tribute to Ventris was the most “simple and touching”: “Devant les siècles son œuvre est faite” (p. 139). It suggests that his work is complete for centuries to come, a reputation that would endure well beyond him. But his contribution also points backwards, as Benveniste indicated, opening a view of centuries before.

Update August 2025: see also A postcard to Arne Furumark from the 1956 Mycenaean Studies conference – a chance discovery of a message sent to the Swedish archaeologist with most of the participants’ signatures.

References

John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B: The Key to the Ancient Language and Culture of Crete and Mycenae, New York: Vintage, 1958.

Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code and the Uncovering of a Lost Civilisation, New York: Ecco, 2014.

Alice Kober, “Evidence of Inflection in the “Chariot” Tablets from Knossos”, American Journal of Archaeology 49 (2), 1945, 143-51.

Alice Kober, “Inflection in Linear Class B: I – Declension”, American Journal of Archaeology 50 (2), 1946, 268-76.

Alice Kober, “The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory”, American Journal of Archaeology 52 (1), 1948, 82–103.

Michel Lejeune (ed.), Études mycéniennes: Actes du Colloque international sur les textes mycéniens (Gif-sur-Yvette, 3-7 avril 1956), Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1956.

Andrew Robinson, The Man who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris, London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, “Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives”, Journal of Hellenic Studies 73, 1953, 84-103.

Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaen Greek, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956.

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