The Riddle of the Labyrinth (16 page)

On the same principle, as Kober knew, it should be possible to take a linguistic X-ray of a
later
Aegean language and discern traces of the lost language of the Minoans glinting beneath the surface. And so she began by scrutinizing a language she knew well, Classical Greek. Starting in the early 1930s, she spent several years combing Greek for survivals from a time before Greek speakers arrived in the region—words of pre-Hellenic origin.

Compiling an accurate list of these linguistic ghosts, Kober wrote in 1942, “would be of great importance to scholars who are trying to formulate the principles underlying the language or languages of pre-Hellenic Greece and of the Minoan scripts.” These survivals by themselves would not tell her what the language of the Minoans had been—she was far too sophisticated to think that. But they might begin to reveal the structure of the words of that language. In Homer alone, she wrote, the number of pre-Hellenic words ran “into the thousands.”

Among the pre-Hellenic words Kober identified in Greek were many ending in the suffix
-inth
(or
-inthos)
, including
merinthos
, “cord, string”;
plinthos
, “brick” (think of the English word
plinth)
;
minthos
(“mint”); and
labyrinthos
, the “labyrinth” itself.

Her prospects improved in 1935, when Evans published his last major work, volume 4 of
The Palace of Minos
. Part of the volume was about Linear B, and it included photos and drawings of previously unseen tablets. This brought the number of available inscriptions to about two hundred. To anyone who hoped to decipher the script, that was still far from ideal, but it was a start.

For Kober, the volume's publication seemed to mark a point of no return. She had tried several times to tear herself away from Linear B, and each time found she could not. “I've resigned myself,” she wrote in 1942. “If I want peace, I must first finish the job, or work till someone else finishes it.” Now, at last, she could begin in earnest to compile the statistics so vital to any decipherment.

ON JULY 11, 1941, three days after his ninetieth birthday, Arthur Evans died in England, leaving nearly two thousand inscriptions from Knossos unpublished. There was little chance they would be made public anytime soon. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he had arranged for the tablets to be hidden for safekeeping in the Heraklion Museum. In May 1941, Crete fell to the Nazis, who quickly appropriated Evans's Villa Ariadne as their command post. At war's end, the Greek government had no money to retrieve, clean, and catalogue the tablets; they would remain in the museum, inaccessible, for years to come.

In her first public paper on the script—presented in December 1941, five months after Evans died—Kober did little to hide her resentment. “No archaeologist, however able, can be certain of finding inscriptions, but it is clearly his duty to publish them adequately when they have been found,” she said. “This has not been done.” As a result, she explained, scholars couldn't agree on issues as basic as how many signs Linear B contained, or precisely which signs those were. This in turn made one of the first objectives of any archaeological decipherment—compiling lists of the script's signs and words—utterly impossible. “In the sign lists published by Evans, for instance, several signs . . . appear that do not occur in any known inscription, often without the slightest clue as to their use or origin,” Kober said. “Most unforgivable of all is the fact that signs actually appearing in published inscriptions do not occur in any list whatsoever.” She added, in an astringent understatement: “These inadequacies hinder us at every turn.”

At the time, only a few facts about Linear B could be stated with certainty, most established early on by Evans. The script direction (left to right) was known. Word divisions were readily apparent, and the numerical system was well understood. It was clear that Linear B was a syllabary. The script also contained a set of logographic characters, and the meaning of many of these was plain. That the Cretan scribes used separate pictograms for male and female animals was known, though scholars disagreed as to which represented which. This was also the case for the words “boy” and “girl”—
and
—identified as a pair in 1927 by the historical linguist A. E. Cowley.

The meaning of only one Linear B word was known with any degree of certainty. The word was
, and while no one knew how to pronounce it, context revealed its identity: It appeared regularly at the bottom of Minoan inventories, just before the tally, and almost assuredly meant “total.” All in all, it was not much to show for forty years' work.

HOW DOES A decipherer penetrate such a tightly closed system? There is only one way possible, and it can be illustrated by means of a delightful puzzle from the International Linguistics Olympiad, an annual competition for high school students.

The puzzle, adapted below from one used in the 2010 contest, was created by Alexander Piperski; it involves a real writing system, known as Blissymbolics. Blissymbolics was invented after World War II by Charles K. Bliss (né Karl Blitz), an Austrian Jew who had survived Buchenwald. It is an attempt to devise a universal writing system that can be understood by speakers of any language. Blissymbolics is an example of a pure ideographic system, in which each symbol stands for an entire concept.

Here are eleven English words, numbered for reference, written in Blissymbolics:

The translations—in random order—are these:

The object is to match each symbol with the correct translation. (The general method of decipherment is described below; the full solution is revealed in the Notes.)

When one confronts a problem like this, a natural first reaction is panic: The strange symbols look utterly impenetrable. But they aren't, as closer inspection reveals, for every clue needed to solve the puzzle lies buried somewhere within the problem itself.

From the outset, we have one great advantage over the Linear B investigators: We are dealing here with a bilingual inscription—albeit one with the translations in the wrong order. Even so, this gives us a tremendous head start. Let us begin, then, by examining the set of English words.

We see immediately that the set contains different parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, and verbs. This is the first internal clue the problem offers, and we will make use of it in the time-honored way, by counting. We arrive at this tally:

These numbers may prove useful: We now know that the group of eleven Bliss symbols contains four nouns and four adjectives, but only
three
verbs. If we can find something that characterizes precisely three of the symbols, we may well have found the verbs. With this in mind, we turn now to the symbols themselves. At this stage, we won't try to translate any of them, however tempting that might be. We are going to treat them as objects of pure form and nothing more.

As we study the symbols, we notice two things. First, all but one of them (No. 10) have more than one component part. This may be important, though we don't yet know how. Second, several symbols are topped with smaller marks—a hatlike caret
or a V-shaped sign
. We can sort the eleven symbols on this basis: