A visit to the township of Chora offers the opportunity to see the Archaeological Museum. There the findings of the excavations of the Archaeological Society in Ancient Messene and Pylos can be investigated in detail. The museum was built between 1968 and 1972 at the western slope of the village Mavromati. The exhibits supplement the image of wealth and importance of the city.
Here the visitors discover findings from the Palace of Nestor, the Tholos Tombs and the archaeological sites of the area. Also jewellery made of gold, artefacts and statues that date to the Mycenaean period. It is one of the richest collections of remains belonging to the Mycenaean civilization in Greece.
Copies of the Linear B tablets acquired great significance when the British architect Michael Ventris publically announced that he found a way to decipher an unknown until then writing: the Creto-Mycenean Linear B. Many clay tablets from Crete, Mycenae, Pylos and more, bear this writing. Ventris' assumption was that the language of the tablets is Greek. Initially he used material from Knossos. The Linear B tablets from Pylos reinforced his hypothesis that it is actually Greek.
Reading the tablets taking as a basis the Greek language brought about many subversions. Ventris managed to read the notorious bilingual tablet of Pylos, the so-called "tripod tablet", by implementing the values of syllabic signs. Thus, the history of the Greek language doesn't begin in the 8th century BCE as it was believed until 1952 given the discovery of the alphabetical inscriptions on the Dipylon oinochoe or the "cup of Nestor" that belong to the same period but after Ventris' deciphering it was pushed back to the beginning of the 15th century BCE, the time of the Linear B tablets (Knossos, Phaistos, Pylos, Mycenae, Thebes).
Reading the tablets taking as a basis the Greek language brought about many subversions. Ventris managed to read the notorious bilingual tablet of Pylos, the so-called "tripod tablet", by implementing the values of syllabic signs. Thus, the history of the Greek language doesn't begin in the 8th century BCE as it was believed until 1952 given the discovery of the alphabetical inscriptions on the Dipylon oinochoe or the "cup of Nestor" that belong to the same period but after Ventris' deciphering it was pushed back to the beginning of the 15th century BCE, the time of the Linear B tablets (Knossos, Phaistos, Pylos, Mycenae, Thebes).
