Mycenaean Greek (c.1400-1200 B.C.)

The decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris in 1952 demonstrated that the language recorded in the clay tablets was Mycenaean Greek, some 700-500 years before Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The inscriptions from Knossos, Pylos, Mycenae and Tiryns, Thebes, Iolkos, Midea and Chania clearly demonstrate the nature of Greek as a well-defined, distinct branch of the Indo-European language family.

Linear B records the Greek language in the second half of the second millennium, from the Mycenaean takeover of Knossos until the destruction of Pylos, shortly after the Trojan War. The works of Ventris, Chadwick and others have shown the phonology and morphology of Mycenaean Greek, and its unbroken development into Classical, Hellenistic, Byzantine and Modern Greek. It is possible, by interpreting Mycenaean inscriptions, to write the history of Mycenaean Greece (c.1400-1200 B.C.)