1) ''In the Victorian age, the widely accepted view of Greek history was that it had begun in 776 B.C., the date of the first known Olympics. The Greek alphabet, borrowed from the Phoenicians not long before, had made writing possible, and with it, recorded history. The Classical Era, with its spectacular achievements in arts, letters, and science, would follow soon afterward, at its height spanning the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C. Before the Classical Era, historians believed, lay a long Greek Dark Age. Lasting from about 1200 to 800 B.C., it was a time in which literacy, high art, and skilled architecture were unknown in Greek lands. By Homer's day, circa 800 B.C., Greece was 'at a comparatively low level of civilization,' as John Chadwick wrote in 1976. And yet, he added, the Greece Homer describes in his epics---the Greece of five centuries earlier---'is a network of well-organized kingdoms capable of joint military action; its kings live in luxurious stone-built palaces, adorned with gold, ivory and other precious metals.'''
2) [Alice Kober] '''For Minoan the clue must be sought in the scripts themselves, and no theory, no matter how attractive, can stand up until it is borne out by incontrovertible evidence from the scripts.... If the decipherer starts with the conviction that Minoan is related to Chinese, and ends up with the conclusion that he was right, having 'proved' it by translating the documents, he has usually been reasoning in circles. It is one thing to start by considering all the known facts, and to come to a conclusion. It is quite another to start with a preconceived idea, and try to prove it. A scholar's worst enemy is his own mind. Facts are slippery things. Almost anything can be proved with them, if they are correctly selected...
It is unfortunate that it is only in geometry that a scholar must state his assumptions clearly before he begins his proof...'''
3) ''In the course of three millennia, the Linear B tablets passed from complete readability to complete obscurity and, against all odds, back to readability again. They reveal much about who the Mycenaeans were, from aristocrats through artisans and tradesmen and down to slaves. Though scholars continue to debate the precise interpretation of particular tablets, the Linear B archives as a whole disclose the day-to-day workings of a going civilization three thousand years distant, including, as the Mycenologist Cynthia W. Shelmerdine has written, 'the movement of goods..., the status of land and animal holdings, the manufacture and repair of various kinds of equipment, and the personnel needed to carry out all the business of a Mycenaean state.'
The members of that state were flesh-and-blood men and women, as the tablets clearly show. Their account books, set in clay and baked in unintended fire, tell us what they sowed and reaped, what they ate and drank, the names of the gods they worshipped (with members of the Greek pantheon standing shoulder to shoulder with strange, pre-Greek deities), how they earned their keep, how they passed their time, how they defended themselves and made war. We even know their names, some of them names of exquisite nobility, others names one wouldn't wish on a dog.''
4) ''So ended the first flush of Greek civilization, and from then till the coming of the Greek alphabet centuries later, the art of writing was at best a dimly remembered dream. Before long the Mycenaean archives---describing a world of monarchs and slaves, gods and goddesses, spinners and weavers, men who made art and men who made war---had passed from readability into darkness, where they would languish for three thousand years.
That we have been able to admit this world to the annals of history owes to a long confluence of natural forces and forceful natures. Had the ancient palaces not burned to the ground; had Schliemann not dug at Mycenae; had Arthur Evans not been so very determined (and so very nearsighted); had Alice Kober not painstakingly scissored 180,000 index cards from odd scraps of paper; had Michael Ventris not been such a woeful boy, in deep need of intellectual distraction, we would know nothing of the written records of these early Greeks---the Bronze Age heroes of whom Homer would sing---unearthed, unlocked, and readable once more.''
