The Riddle of the Labyrinth (13 page)

Then there were the symbols that looked, as Kahn wrote, “like nothing at all in this world.” Among them were these:

By Evans's initial count, there were at least eighty such characters, a figure that strongly suggested the presence of a syllabary. A further clue came from the number of characters in each sign-group: there were normally between two and five, which also pointed to a syllabic system. As the anthropologist E. J. W. Barber explains in her book
Archaeological Decipherment
, counting the signs in each group is another fine diagnostic tool in the decipherer's arsenal:

Linear B appeared, then, to be a mixed script, part syllabic, part logographic. (In this respect, it is not unlike modern Japanese writing.) Evans himself suspected as much: The trick of counting characters to pinpoint the type of script was already well known in his day. But though he knew Linear B was largely syllabic, the presence of so many pictographic symbols would ultimately seduce him, severely hampering his efforts to decipher it. As a result, his assault on the script would occupy him for much of the next forty years.

DURING THESE YEARS, scholars around the world were clamoring to see the tablets. “No effort will be spared to publish the whole collected material at the earliest possible moment,” Evans had proclaimed in print after the first season's dig. But when, in 1909, he published
Scripta Minoa
, his three-hundred-page book on the Cretan scripts, only about two dozen pages were devoted to Linear A and B combined. The rest of the text was given over to Evans's painstaking description of the earlier, hieroglyphic script of Crete. (While the book expounded on the symbolism of individual hieroglyphic characters, the author did not attempt to translate the hieroglyphic inscriptions themselves, a feat he wisely deemed impossible.) Although Evans promised additional volumes giving full accounts of the linear scripts, none materialized in his lifetime. As generations of would-be decipherers chafed bitterly, the Knossos tablets remained locked away.

Evans had his reasons. Under a time-honored anthropological tradition that owes much to the colonial imperative, the first investigator to set foot in a village or excavate a ruin retains an unspoken proprietary interest in the place. Future claimants enter at their peril. But there is also a tacit if unspecified time limit by which the original scholar must publish. If he fails to do so, then his turf is fair game.

As the first decades of the twentieth century ticked away, Evans's time limit appeared to have stretched to unsporting length. Though he gave numerous accounts of his finds to mainstream papers like the
Times
of London, he published little significant analysis of the tablets in scholarly journals. Not only did he decline to make most of the tablets themselves available for study, but he also appeared loath to publish drawings or photographs of them: Of the more than two thousand tablets Evans eventually unearthed at Knossos, he would publish reproductions of fewer than two hundred during his lifetime. (In the 1930s, Johannes Sundwall, a distinguished Finnish scholar, published copies of thirty-eight tablets he had managed to see in a Cretan museum, an act that brought down the wrath of Evans.)

In fairness, Evans had many distractions. He remained keeper of the Ashmolean till 1908, and his duties there took time. At home in England, he was active in a string of professional organizations, serving more or less simultaneously as president of the Hellenic Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Royal Numismatic Society, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. (For his services to archaeology, Evans was knighted in 1911.) He was also involved in good works, in particular with the local Boy Scout troop, which he gave the run of Youlbury's grounds. Having no children of his own, he took in two wards, first a nephew of Margaret's and, shortly afterward, the son of an Oxfordshire tenant farmer.

With the start of World War I in 1914, digging on Crete became impossible for the duration. Evans was still deeply involved in Balkan affairs, and even before the war's end in 1918, he was taking an active hand in the negotiations that led to the creation of the Yugoslav state.

He was also building three houses. The first was Youlbury, an ongoing project that eventually comprised some two dozen bedrooms, a sunken Roman bath, orchards, magnificent gardens, and a great deal else. Its vaulted marble entrance hall, which looked like nothing so much as a Beaux Arts savings bank and could have housed one comfortably, had a mosaic floor set in a labyrinth pattern, with a tiled Minotaur at the center. Standing imposingly nearby were two huge replicas, carved in mahogany, of the throne of Minos.

“Evans' friends variously described Youlbury as ‘shocking' or ‘fantastic,' depending on their tolerance for sheer bulk,” his biographer Sylvia Horwitz wrote. “It defied all architectural principles of proportion or uniformity of style. Vast to begin with, it grew monstrously large as it rambled without reason and sprouted additions to accommodate this fantasy or that whim of its owner.”

The second house was on Crete. Completed in 1906, it was built by Christian Doll, one of the architects Evans had engaged to direct the reconstruction of the Palace of Minos. The house, which Evans called Villa Ariadne, let him live on the island in accustomed style. Not for him the local wine, made from fermented raisins, that his workmen heartily drank: The villa's cellar was stocked with French wines and champagne. As news of Evans's exploits traveled round the world in the popular press, Villa Ariadne received a string of distinguished visitors, among them the financier J. P. Morgan and the novelist Edith Wharton. When not entertaining, Evans superintended the excavation as elegantly turned out as he would be in a London gentlemen's club. “On the hottest days of a Cretan summer he never came to the dig in shirtsleeves,” Horwitz wrote.

The third house was the Palace of Minos—or, more accurately, the Palace of Many Minoses. (“Minos,” as Evans suspected, was most likely a dynastic title like “king” or “pharaoh” rather than a personal name. Down the centuries, a series of Minoses would have held court at Knossos.) Over years of excavation, the palace emerged as a vast, increasingly complex organism. As each section was revealed, Evans gave it a name. Besides the Throne Room, these included the Queen's Megaron, or great hall, with its elaborate bathroom and graceful mural of leaping dolphins; the Domestic Quarter, with artisans' workshops in which traces of the goldsmith, the lapidary, and the ceramicist could still be discerned; and the Grand Staircase, down which, in 1910, a visiting Isadora Duncan danced an impromptu dance to the horror of Evans's straitlaced Scottish assistant, Duncan Mackenzie.

With his team of artists, archaeologists, architects, and laborers, Evans spent decades clearing rubble, shoring up collapsing landings, restoring shattered murals, and rebuilding crumbling walls. Where the Minoans had used wood and stone, much of the restoration used newer materials like reinforced concrete. The work was controversial: As Evans rebuilt rooms and repainted murals, he imposed his vision—by definition speculative—of what the palace must have looked like thirty centuries earlier. Today, Knossos is a bustling tourist attraction, but whether it reflects the genuine Minoan aesthetic or an ardent twentieth-century fantasy is an open question.

THROUGHOUT THE FIRST decades of the century, scholars were following Evans's few publications on Linear B with rapt interest. Like him, they could only speculate on what the ancient language of the tablets might have been. Just one thing seemed certain: It wasn't Greek. Today, we reflexively associate Crete with Greek speech, but the Palace of Minos flourished long before early Hellenic peoples—the first Greek speakers—were known to have reached the island.

There was another reason the tablets couldn't be Greek, and this one came from Evans himself, an edict handed down from Olympus: The language of Knossos wasn't Greek because the people of Knossos were altogether different from those of the mainland, where the first Greeks would later settle. Bronze Age Cretans were not only different from their mainland contemporaries, Evans emphatically declared, but they were also superior to them in every conceivable way.

In his earliest writings on the Cretan scripts, Evans assumed, quite reasonably, that the civilization at Knossos was simply an outpost of the larger Mycenaean one on the mainland. But as treasure after treasure was lifted from the ruins of the Palace of Minos, and as mural after mural was restored to reveal images of bright flora, leaping animals, and handsome men and women clad in beautiful garments, Evans became convinced that the civilization he had unearthed at Knossos was older, higher, and far better than the rude Mycenae of the mainland. Before long—and his growing infatuation is palpable in his writings—Evans had fallen in love with “his” Cretans, whose art and architecture seemed to him vastly more refined than what Schliemann had found at Mycenae.

“As excavation went on, . . .the ‘Mycenaean' culture of the Greek mainland ceased to be an adequate standard for Cretan achievements,” the archaeologist John L. Myres, Evans's former assistant, later wrote. The civilization at Knossos, Evans soon came to believe, represented a completely separate culture from that of the mainland. He called his island culture Minoan, after its storied ruler. To Evans, the few examples of Linear B script unearthed on the mainland only proved how pervasive Minoan influence had been: Crete was not a colony of the mainland, he argued; if anything, it was the other way around. Before long, as the classicist Thomas G. Palaima said in a 2002 BBC television documentary about the decipherment, Evans had imbued his vision of the Minoan-dominated Aegean “with the grandeur of the British Empire.”

In archaeology, Evans's word was law. If Minoan culture was distinct from Mycenaean, then it followed that its language was different, too. Even if Greek-speaking people had entered Mycenae earlier than supposed, the gradual Hellenization of the mainland would have had no bearing on Crete, with its separate language and culture. It was clear—clear to Evans, at least—that the language of Linear B was the indigenous Minoan tongue, whatever it might have been. Through Evans's dominance in the field, his position was soon clear to everyone else, too. The few scholars who dared to question him met with swift and certain professional punishment, and for the first half of the twentieth century, the idea of Minoan supremacy was almost universally accepted.

This did not stop scholars and members of the public from enthusiastic speculation as to what the Minoan language might actually have been. Candidates ranged from the preposterous (Basque) to the plausible (Etruscan, the lost language of Italy).

All these things conspired to hold up the decipherment of Linear B for decades. But there was another thing, which by itself would have trumped any combination of distraction, ego, and ideology: Arthur Evans was simply in over his head, something this tiny colossus bestriding the Aegean Bronze Age was constitutionally loath to admit.

Some of his trouble owed to pure bad luck: Where the decipherers of the Egyptian hieroglyphics had the Rosetta stone to help them crack the code, no bilingual inscription for Linear B was found during Evans's lifetime, nor has one surfaced even now. In addition, though he pored over the tablets for years, Evans wasn't trained in the kind of methodical analysis that helps a cryptographer crack a secret code—the kind that offers the only possible entry into an unknown language in an unknown script. “Evans does not . . . seem to have had any clear plan for the solution of the script,” Ventris's later collaborator John Chadwick wrote. “His suggestions were in many cases sound, but they were disjointed observations and he never laid down any methodical procedure.”