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It's March 30, 1900, on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean. A few miles inshore, on a flower covered hill overlooking the sea, a dig is underway. Arthur Evans, a 48 year old English archaeologist, leans on his stick and lowers himself into a long trench carved out of the earth. A local digger stops his shoveling and looks on as Arthur, in a spotless white suit, kneels to examine what the man has found. The wind gusting in from the coast blows dust off the shattered remnants of an ancient vase. Arthur peers closely at the half buried shards of pottery. He is severely short sighted but refuses to wear glasses, making everyday life difficult. But Arthur finds it invaluable for excavations when close, detailed examination is paramount. As he looks over the pottery exposed to the air for the first time in thousands of years, there's an excited shout from the other side of the site. Arthur looks up as other diggers abandon their work to rush across the mound in the direction of the shouting. Arthur climbs up out of the trench and hurries to follow them. As he approaches the crowd, the Englishman finds a young digger, his face shining with sweat and excitement. He's holding a long, narrow bar of clay that he's just pulled from the earth. He passes it gently to Arthur, and even with his poor eyesight, the archaeologists can see at once that there's something special about it. The dull rectangle of clay is inscribed with strange symbols, a mixture of lines, pictures and circles. It's clearly writing, but when the young digger asks Arthur what it is exactly, all Arthur can honestly say is, I don't know. Over the weeks and months of excavation that follow, Arthur and his team unearth a vast complex of interlocking rooms and hallways buried beneath the hilltop. Arthur identifies it as the Bronze Age city of Knossos. The discovery makes the English archaeologists famous around the world, but Arthur's most intriguing finds are the hundreds of clay tablets discovered scattered throughout the ancient palace. Dating to around 1500 BCE they are the records of an ancient civilization and evidence of the earliest writing ever discovered in Europe. Arthur dubs the strange writing Linear B, but nobody knows how to read it. It's a mystery that will baffle scholars for decades until linear B is finally deciphered, and not by an archaeologist or expert linguist, but by a brilliant amateur. A young man named Michael Ventris will embark on an obsessive hunt for a solution to the puzzle, a journey of discovery that will end in worldwide fame, but that began in the dust of Crete on this day, March 30, 1900.