Ping
Wow! Those guys had some funky looking arrows back then.
This dig is at Iklaina, not at Pylos itself—the palace at Pylos was discovered as long ago as 1939.
And an autographed photo of Brad Pitt ...
Blegen needed to find that archive, as Evans was sitting on the first (and only other) archive of Linear B. Evans was convinced that none of the three scripts found at Knossos concealed the Greek language. Linear B was indeed cracked by Michael Ventris, who did indeed find Greek concealed there. Linear A has never been translated to the satisfaction of any scholar save the few who have claimed to have done it. :') (they mostly don't agree with one another) The glyphic script was never found in much quantity, and Linear A is believed by some to not have enough surviving examples to ever crack it, short of turning up a bilingual text.Homer's Bones:...There were tons of pottery fragments and other ancient detritus stored there. And there were animal bones, lots of them... Their remains had been excavated on April 4, 1939, in what may have been the luckiest first day in archaeological history. That day, Carl Blegen, Stocker's predecessor at the University of Cincinnati, was digging an exploratory trench through an olive grove when one of his workmen lifted a clay tablet from the soil. Lightly brushing away the dirt, Blegen saw at once that the tablet was incised in Linear B, an undeciphered script known from Bronze Age Crete and never before seen on the Greek mainland. That spring, before war closed in on Greece, Blegen raced to unearth hundreds more tablets, providing the critical mass for deciphering the script. The tablets revealed that the people of this hilltop palace wrote in an early form of Greek. Although they never named their king, Blegen became convinced that his name was Nestor.
Can an archaeological dig in Greece
reveal the line between truth and fiction
in the Iliad and the Odyssey?
by John Fleischman
July 1, 2002