The Riddle of the Labyrinth (2 page)

The scholarly field on which Kober did battle in the 1930s and '40s was very much a man's world, and it is understandable, if now unpalatable, that her male contemporaries so often characterized her in terms of maidenish qualities. That at least some twenty-first-century writers continue to accept this appraisal is far less understandable, and far less palatable.

In focusing primarily on Kober's story, I in no way intend to diminish the stunning achievement of Ventris, or of Arthur Evans, the English archaeologist who uncovered the tablets. It is simply that other writers have already recounted their work in some detail; these sources can be found in the References. Kober's role in the decipherment, so vital yet so long overlooked, is the logical narrative armature on which to build this book. I have chosen to quote extensively from her letters in the chapters devoted to her life, for it is through them, even more than through her masterful published writings, that she truly reveals herself.

All this said,
The Riddle of the Labyrinth
also discharges a debt to Ventris. In my daytime life, I have the great privilege of working as an obituary news writer at the
New York Times
, where I am paid to write the narrative histories of extraordinary people who have done extraordinary things. In September 1956, after Ventris died, obituaries appeared in newspapers throughout Europe. But for unknown reasons, most American papers, including the
Times
, overlooked the news of his death entirely. It can happen. Receiving timely news from abroad was a less reliable proposition then, and obituaries were less valuable journalistic properties. Assuming that word of the death reached the
Times
's newsroom at all, it would have taken little more than one bleary-eyed night editor who had heard neither of Ventris nor of Linear B for the obituary to have been consigned to the spike. As a result, Ventris's achievement is far less well known to American readers than it might be. And so, to rectify the omission six decades belatedly—and to uphold the honor of my profession—here, too, is his story.

What is more, the process by which Ventris cracked the code has remained something of a black box all these years. As his biographer Andrew Robinson has astutely written: “There is no thread like Ariadne's running through the Linear B decipherment labyrinth. Even Ventris himself was unable to produce a coherent narrative of his method.” By examining the architecture of the sturdy methodological bridge that Kober built,
The Riddle of the Labyrinth
is able to illuminate the steps Ventris took in his triumphant crossing.

If the course of the decipherment were charted on paper, the Kober and Ventris narratives would form two sides of an equilateral triangle, Kober's side slanting upward to the apex, and Ventris's, in mirror image, slanting downward from the apex to close the figure. But there is a third side—the base—and it represents the third actor in the drama, the charismatic Victorian archaeologist Arthur Evans, who unearthed the tablets in 1900.

More than any other investigators, it is these three, Evans, Kober, and Ventris—the digger, the detective, and the architect—who animate the decipherment, and it is to each of them in turn that this book's three major sections are devoted. And so it is with Evans, the foundation, that our story begins.

Knossos, Crete, 1900

T
HE TABLET, WHEN IT EMERGED from the ground, was in nearly perfect condition. A long, narrow rectangle of earthen clay, it tapered toward the ends, resembling a palm leaf in shape. One end was broken: That was not surprising, after three thousand years. But the rest of the tablet was intact, and on it, inscribed numbers were plainly visible. Alongside the numbers was a series of bewildering symbols, which looked like none ever seen.

In the coming weeks, workmen would lift from the earth dozens more tablets, some fractured beyond repair, others completely undamaged. All were incised with the same curious symbols, including these:

The tablets were what Arthur Evans had come to Crete to find. It had taken him only a week to locate the first one, but his discovery would forever change the face of ancient history.

ON MARCH 23, 1900, Evans, a few carefully chosen assistants, and thirty local workmen had broken ground at Knossos, in the wild countryside of northern Crete near present-day Heraklion. There, not far from the sea, on a knoll bright with anemones and iris, Evans had vowed years earlier that he would dig.

He was rewarded almost immediately. Even before the first week was out, his workmen's spades turned up fragments of painted plaster frescoes in still-vivid hues, depicting scenes of people, plants, and animals. Digging deeper, they found pieces of enormous clay storage jars that reassembled would stand tall as a man. Still farther down, they encountered rows of huge gypsum blocks, the walls of a vast prehistoric building.

Evans had come upon the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization, previously unknown, that had flowered on Crete from about 1850 to 1450 B.C. Predating the Greek Classical Age by a thousand years, it was the oldest European civilization ever discovered.

At forty-eight, Arthur Evans was already one of the foremost archaeologists in Britain. His discovery at Knossos, which the newspapers swiftly relayed around the globe, would make him among the most celebrated in the world. For the sprawling building beneath the knoll, he soon concluded, was none other than the palace of Minos, the legendary ruler of Crete, who crops up centuries later in Homer's epic poems, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
.

As Classical Greek myth told it afterward, King Minos had presided over a powerful maritime empire centered at Knossos. He held court in a huge palace resplendent with golden treasures and magnificent works of art, oversaw a thriving economy, and controlled the Aegean after making its waters safe from piracy. He was said to have installed an immense mechanical man, known as Talos and made of bronze, to patrol the Cretan shore and hurl rocks at approaching enemy ships.

It was for Minos, legend held, that the architect Daedalus had built the Cretan labyrinth, which housed at its center the fearsome Minotaur—half-man, half-bull. And it was Minos's daughter, Ariadne, with her ball of red thread, who helped her lover, Theseus, escape from the labyrinth, where he had been sent to be sacrificed. As Evans's prolonged excavation would reveal, the palace at Knossos spanned hundreds of rooms linked by a network of twisting passages. Surely, he would write, this vast complex was the historic basis of the enduring myth of the labyrinth.

Unseen for nearly three thousand years, the Knossos palace was hailed as one of the most spectacular archaeological finds of all time, “such a find,” Evans wrote, “as one could not hope for in a lifetime or in many lifetimes.” In his first season alone, he uncovered an exquisite marble fountain shaped like the head of a lioness, with eyes of enamel; carvings of ivory and crystal; ornate stone friezes; and, still more impressive, a carved alabaster throne, the oldest in Europe.

But these treasures paled beside what Evans found on the excavation's eighth day. On March 30, a workman's spade dislodged the first clay tablet. On April 5, a whole cache of tablets, many in perfect condition, was found in a single room of the palace.

The tablets, when Evans unearthed them, were Europe's earliest written records. Inscribed with a stylus when the clay was still wet, they dated to about 1450 B.C., nearly seven centuries before the advent of the Greek alphabet. The characters they contained—outline drawings in the shape of human figures, swords, chariots, and horses' heads, among other tiny pictograms—resembled the symbols of no known alphabet, ancient or modern.

Evans named the ancient writing Linear Script Class B—Linear B, for short. (He also turned up evidence of a somewhat older Cretan script, likewise based on outline drawings, which he called Linear Script Class A.) By the end of his first season's dig, he had unearthed more than a thousand tablets written in Linear B.

Though Evans couldn't read the tablets, he immediately surmised what they were: administrative records, carefully set down by royal scribes, documenting the day-to-day workings of the Knossos palace and its holdings. If the tablets could be decoded, they would open a wide portal onto the daily life of a refined, wealthy, and literate society that had thrived in Greek lands a full millennium before the glory of Classical Athens. Once their written records could be read, the Knossos palace and its people, languishing for thirty centuries in the dusk of prehistory, would suddenly be illuminated—with a single stroke, an entire civilization would
become
history.

But which civilization was it? As Evans well knew, many ethnic groups had passed through the Bronze Age Aegean, and there was no way to tell whose language, and whose culture, Linear B represented. To him, though, this seemed a small impediment. Evans was already something of an authority on ancient scripts, and with characteristic assurance, he assumed he would one day decipher this one. By 1901, only a year after the first tablet was unearthed, he had commissioned Oxford University Press to cast a special font, in two different sizes, with which to typeset the Cretan characters.

But Evans underestimated the formidable challenge Linear B would pose. An unknown script used to write an unknown language is a locked-room mystery: Somehow, the decipherer must finesse his way into a tightly closed system that offers few external clues. If he is very lucky, he will have the help of a bilingual inscription like the Rosetta stone, which furnished the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Without such an inscription, his task is all but impossible.

As Evans could scarcely have imagined in 1900, Linear B would become one of the most tantalizing riddles of the first half of the twentieth century, a secret code that defied solution for more than fifty years. As the journalist David Kahn has written in
The Codebreakers
, his monumental study of secret writing, “Of all the decipherments of history, the most elegant, the most coolly rational, the most satisfying, and withal the most surprising” was that of Linear B.

The quest to decipher the tablets—or even to identify the language in which they were written—would become the consuming passion of investigators around the globe. Working largely independently in Britain, the United States, and on the European continent, each spent years trying to tease the ancient script apart. The best of them brought to the problem the same meticulous forensic approach that helps cryptanalysts crack the thorniest codes and ciphers.

No prize was offered for deciphering Linear B, nor were the investigators seeking one. For some, like Evans, the chance to read words set down by European men three thousand years distant was compensation enough. For others, the sweet, defiant pleasure of solving a cryptogram many experts deemed unsolvable would be its own best reward.