2019, A. KARNAVA, «Bedřich Hrozný and the Aegean writing systems: an early decipherment attempt», in R. I. KIM, J. MYNÁŘOVÁ, P. PAVÚK (EDS.), Hrozný and Hittite. The first hundred years, Proceedings of the international conference held at Charles University, Prague, 11-14 November 2015, 62-77. (original) (raw)

Abstract

Before Bedřich Hrozný concluded his scientific career in the 1940s he became interested, among other scripts, in the 2nd mill. BC Aegean writing systems, most notably Linear A and Linear B. There is archival evidence nowadays that his interest was vivacious for a number of years, even after his acute health problems in the mid-1940s. His interest culminated in a proposed decipherment of Linear B. Hrozný had been one of the 12 scholars to whom Michael Ventris, the man who was going to decipher Linear B after all, had addressed his famous ‘Mid-century Report’ in 1949. This report was a questionnaire aiming to bring into the attention of scholars the complex decipherment problems of the Aegean scripts. Hrozný did not reply to the questionnaire, but was always in the list of recipients of Ventris’ ‘Work Notes’. These notes were a sort of progress report, which Ventris sent out to scholars from 1951 until he reached the desired result in 1954. A number of scholars such as Helmuth Bossert (1944), Alice Kober (1946), Spyridon Marinatos (1947) and Emmett Bennett (1950) criticized Hrozný’s decipherment attempt of the Linear B script harshly. The reviews concentrated on both dubious recognitions of sign phonetic values, as well as the historical arguments that were used by Hrozný to support his suggestion. Especially criticized was his lump summing of both Linear A as well as Linear B under an interpretation of a unique Indo-European language. This paper aims to examine the phonetic transcriptions and the historical evaluations proposed by Hrozný at the time, in view of what we now know on the Aegean writing systems in particular, and the Mycenaean civilization in general. His decipherment proposal was one of the first to be presented to the public and was based on the extremely limited Linear B material that had been published at the time. His study of this material was based on the assumption that the Minoan culture was in close contact and affinity with the Near Eastern cultures, a belief that was widespread at the time. An additional clue that led him astray was the fact that simple, ‘linear’ signs, such as the ones used in Aegean writing, were very similar to signs attested in the Egyptian writing systems, in the Hittite Hieroglyphic, in the Indus script and even the Phoenician alphabet. This paper aims to insert Hrozný’s decipherment attempt in the intellectual circumstances of his era and evaluate its position in the history of the decipherment of the Linear B writing system.

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