The Architecture of Linear B

Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Spyros Papapetros
Michael Ventris’ decipherment of Linear B was the more remarkable because he was not a professional scholar. He was an architect who became fascinated by this problem when he was still a teenager, managing to solve it when he was 32 years old. At his death some obituarists suggested that his achievement may have had something to do with his training as an architect. It is the hypothesis of this thesis that while Ventris lacked others’ experience in the field, his advantage came not just from his ‘brilliance’ but also from the forms of analysis he had acquired from his architectural training at the AA in the 1940’s.

Manolis Stavrakakis was born in Heracleion (Crete) in 1981. He studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Columbia University (MSc in Advanced Architectural Design). He has been practising as an architect and teaching since 2005 in Herakleion, Athens and London.