Education: Where the Twain Met

The hundreds of clay tablets found in the ruins of King Minos' palace at Knossos, Crete, and on the supposed site of King Nestor's palace near Pylos on the Greek mainland long provided archaeology with one of its most tantalizing mysteries. The tablets bore two scripts which scholars call Linear A and Linear B. But it was not until 1952—more than half a century after the Crete discovery —that Michael Ventris, British architect and cryptographer, broke Linear B, announced that its 87 "signs" closely paralleled Greek syllables (TIME, April 19, 1954). But what...