Describe the decipherment of Linear B.

The Linear
B syllabary used by the Mycenaean was first deciphered in 1952 by Ventris and Chadwick.
A large number of Linear B tablets had been found at Knossos in Crete (and also Pylos on the
mainland), meaning that Ventris, a mathematician familiar with the cryptological advances from
World War II could apply frequency analysis to the tablets. A pattern of similar word beginnings
with varied endings showed the language to be inflected. Ventris guessed that the language was
Greek, and began searching for known Cretan place names beginning with characters he assumed to
be vowels. Slowly, he identified the language as a syllabary and began to construct a syllable
table. Once he had identified a small number of syllables, he and Chadwick realized that they
were dealing with an early form of Greek with some strong similarities to Homeric Greek and
quickly began to identify common words and place names. The large number of tablets recovered
enabled use of statistical methodology.

The tablets are short
administrative records, mainly of who paid or sent what goods to whom, and reveal a great deal
about the economic and material culture of Mycenaean Greece.