About a month ago I unearthed a copy of John Chadwick’s The Decipherment of LINEAR B in the family library, a somewhat haphazard collection of books located in a classically cold and inert cellar. When I opened the small book I saw my mother’s name on the inside cover and below her name read “Classics 111”—a book from her college days. The title and what was written beneath it interested me—The Key to the Ancient Language and Culture of Crete and Mycenae.
I opened it and began to read. By page one of Chapter One I was hooked.
“The urge to discover secrets is deeply ingrained in human nature; even the least curious mind is roused by the promise of sharing knowledge withheld from others.”
This won’t be a summary of the book or a content analysis, because the truth is I haven’t yet read it, though I plan to (and let’s face it, even if I did read it I wouldn’t be qualified to analyze it.) What I did read, however, was a description of the man who did this deciphering—and when I looked up his bio and learned that he died at 34, an age I am familiar with at the moment, the subject was promoted to that which I deem worthy of my attention. To learn of a man, or a boy really, who set out to make sense of Europe’s earliest language and succeeded and then had his life cut short—that certainly was something to think about.
What have I deciphered? I thought. I wasn’t sure of the answer but suddenly felt compelled to do something more than what I was already doing.
“In 1936 a fourteen-year-old schoolboy was among a party who visited Burlington House in London to see an exhibition organized to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the British School of Archaeology at Athens. They heard a lecture by the grand old man of Greek archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans; he told them of his discovery of a long forgotten civilization in the Greek island of Crete, and of the mysterious writing used by this fabulous people of pre-history. In that hour a seed was planted that was dramatically to bear fruit sixteen years later; for this boy was already keenly interested in ancient scripts and languages. At the age of seven he had bought and studied a German book on the Egyptian hieroglyphics. He vowed then and there to take up the challenge of the undeciphered Cretan writing; he began to read the books on it, he even started a correspondence with the experts. And in the fullness of time he succeeded where they had failed. His name was Michael Ventris.”
I’ve often thought that people who knew from a young age what they wanted to pursue were rather fortunate—my father who is a scientist tells me from an early age he was interested in science. So it got me wondering, how is it for others? Those of you out there who knew early on and those of you who got to where you were going later on. I am certainly part of the latter group—
And is this of any consequence? Certainly there are examples out there of those who demonstrate early on that they have an affinity for and a desire, if not an obsession, to excel in a given field. Though I believe there are also examples of those who weren’t composing sonatas at five, or writing sonnets at six, or reading about Egyptian hieroglyphics at seven.
So I wonder then, do we need to be obsessed, all-consumed to be successful, prolific, exceptional?
I think I will end with that question as this is my last post as guest blogger of the week—thank you to those of you who took the time to read my posts and to those of you who made comments as well.
All the best—Amy Allara
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/linear-b.shtml
