When classicist Michael Ventris deciphered the Linear B script in 1952, he did more than extend the history of the Greek language back to 1400–1200 B.C.E., half a millennium before the earliest attested texts in the Greek alphabet. He shed light on all aspects of the world of Late Bronze Age Greece, sometimes referred to as "Mycenaean" Greece, and with it our understanding of politics, economy, society, and religion were immediately enhanced. For the first time we could read the names of historical persons and of the gods they worshipped and descriptions that reflect in some detail the political and economic systems of the palaces where the Linear B texts were found.

Linear B was itself a reuse of an earlier script, called Linear A, which was primarily used on the island of Crete from 1800–1450 B.C.E. This "Minoan" writing system remains undeciphered, despite an extensive effort to crack the code and understand its secrets. Even without a decipherment, however, we can learn a great deal from Linear A. Dimitri Nakassis, classicist and archaeologist at the University of Colorado, explores both scripts and highlights what they can tell us about life in the Aegean during the second millennium B.C.E.

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