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A VERY ENGLISH GENIUS: HOW MICHAEL VENTRIS CRACKED LINEAR B
Thursday 2 February 2006 12.25am-1.25am (Wed night) |
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On 1 July 1952, a 30-year-old architect called Michael Ventris made a BBC radio broadcast which was to secure his place in archaeological and history books forever. He announced that he'd deciphered Linear B, Europe's earliest known, and previously incomprehensible, writing system. His discovery was to revolutionise our understanding of Western civilisation.
It was made all the more remarkable by the fact that Ventris was no more than an amateur enthusiast, a man passionately and often tortuously determined to crack the linguistic code which had puzzled experts, archaeologists and academics for three decades.
The programme investigates the private passion, the personal motivation and the particular psychology of this remarkable individual, and discovers how Ventris solved what has been dubbed "the Everest of Greek archaeology". Interviews with friends and contemporaries reveal Ventris to be an eternal outsider and an unconventional thinker, and suggests that it was precisely his exclusion from British public school cliques and academic communities which afforded him the freedom to take intellectual risks.
Expert code-breakers and cryptographers discuss what it takes to solve a puzzle like Linear B, and archaeologists explain just how important Ventris' discovery actually was: while undoubtedly the earliest known European language, some proclaim it to be the forerunner of the Greek alphabet Homer used 700 years later. Finally, the programme looks into Ventris' often fraught emotional life and endeavours to solve the mystery of his tragic and untimely death in a car accident at the age of 34.
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