1Today we examine how scholars manage to decipher writing systems that no living person can read.
2The classic case is Linear B, a script found on clay tablets across Crete and mainland Greece.
3For roughly half a century, most experts assumed the tablets recorded a lost Cretan language.
4Almost everyone rejected the possibility of Greek, simply because the script looked nothing like the alphabet.
5Michael Ventris, an architect rather than a professional linguist, approached the stubborn problem through statistical patterns.
6He tracked which symbols appeared at the start of words and which appeared at the end.
7The real breakthrough came when he guessed that certain repeated sequences were actually ancient place names.
8Once those names were plugged in, the surrounding words suddenly read as very early Greek.
9In the end, it was not linguistic brilliance alone but patient statistical counting that unlocked the tablets.
10Ironically, the tablets turned out to be mundane warehouse records rather than the lost literature everyone hoped for.
11Yet those dull inventories revealed the economy, administration, and social structure of a whole civilization.