Around 1200 BC, every palace in Greece burned — and with them, writing itself. Not banned, not conquered: forgotten. For 400 years the people who would later produce Plato and Aristotle couldn’t write a single word. They saw the ruins of Mycenae and decided giants must have built them.
This is the story of how a civilization forgets: why Greek writing belonged to just a few dozen palace clerks, how the Bronze Age collapse starved it to death, how Homer’s epics were composed by poets who couldn’t read — and how, 3,000 years later, an amateur architect named Michael Ventris cracked the lost script in his spare time and found the final, timestamped days of a dying world.
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