Did Homer (assuming he existed) invent the first written form of Greek? Now there's a question I can answer, resoundingly, NO!

In 1900, Sir Arthur Evans began excavating at Knossos, on the Greek island of Crete. He was drawn to Crete, in part, by the undeciphered script he saw carved on cylinder seals and gemstones in Athenian antique shops several years before, while he was curator of the Ashmolean Museum.

Evans was probably the first person to identify the scratches as written language. Among the ruins at Knossos, Evans found some 3,000 baked clay tablets, into which were pressed a series of marks eventually recognized as three separate scripts. Knossos is primarily a Minoan site, but it does have a Mycenaean occupation, and the tablets proved to have come from three separate periods.

Earliest Forms of Greek

The earliest form of writing found at Knossos is a pictographic script, primarily carved onto stone seals and only rarely impressed into clay. This language, still undeciphered, is composed of drawings and phonetic symbols and numbers. The pictographic form of the language dates no earlier than the Middle Minoan period, ca. 1900-1650 BC. The second form of writing was called by Evans "Linear A," appears to have evolved out of the earlier pictographic form, and is also still undeciphered. Although the line between the pictographic form of the writing and Linear A is fuzzy, Linear A is usually considered dated to the Proto-Palatial period of the Minoan culture, ca.

1750-1450 BC. Linear A was found on clay, stone and bronze; most of the known Linear A tablets were found at the site of Hagia Triada near Phaistos. Both of these languages are clearly the work of the Minoan culture on Crete. It was the third script, called Linear B by Evans, that made such a huge difference in our understanding of Mycenean culture. Evans found this script on clay tablets dated between 1450 and ca. 1375 BC, when Knossos was destroyed. This last palatial period at Knossos contained several lines of evidence indicating connection to, and perhaps partnership with Mycenaean cities; and Linear B, despite its clear association with Linear A, is considered a Mycenaean language, rather than Minoan. Tablets inscribed with Linear B were subsequently found at Pylos, Chania, Tiryns, and Mycenae itself, both in Crete and on the Greek mainland. And, as was discovered in 1952, the Mycenaean language was Greek.

A Company of Scholars

Although Michael Ventris is traditionally given credit for decoding Linear B, in true scientific fashion, Linear B was cracked by the work of several scholars, building on one another's research. Evans himself identified the scripts and delineated the 89 separate characters; Alice Kober proved the language was a syllabary (that is, the single characters represented consonant-vowel combinations, rather than single sounds) and postulated the phonetic pattern; Michael Ventris analyzed the Pylos tablets and made the connection between Greek and Linear B; and with John Chadwick, applied the resulting transliteration and translation to the entire known corpus of the tablets.

The tablets, when translated, discuss mundane issues: agricultural inventories, military movements, records of real estate transactions. As such, they provide a day-to-day, if incomplete, record of what life in the Mycenaean culture was like, providing insight into the classes that made up the society. But the greater meaning of the identification of the Linear B language as am early form of Greek consists of proof that the Mycenaeans were not invaders from the north, but ancestors of the Greeks; and that the Greek language is at least 3,300 years old, making it one of the longest-used languages of the world, second only to Chinese, and clearly, not invented by the poet. Sorry, Homer.

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