The Riddle of the Labyrinth (23 page)

“When a syllabary is used [inflections] are bound to be obscured,” she wrote, “since even the simplest syllabary consists of signs that combine a consonant and vowel, so that even a slight inflectional alteration may produce a word spelled with entirely different signs.” It was this observation, more than anything else, that would be the linchpin of the decipherment.

ON DECEMBER 13, 1946, a letter with an Oxford return address arrived at Kober's home. She let an hour go by before she dared open it. When she did, she was astounded: Sir John Myres had granted her request to see the Knossos inscriptions. “Please let me know your plans and let me know how I can further them,” he wrote. “The whole material is in my control.”

“I cannot tell you how happy your letter made me,” Kober wrote him in reply. “My fondest hopes [have] materialized.” But as things played out, getting access to the inscriptions was both the best and the worst thing that could have happened to her.

I
N A LITTLE OVER A month, I'll be in the same town with the
Scripts
,” Kober wrote rapturously to Myres in early February 1947. She had just booked her passage by sea—she was somewhat afraid to fly—and would sail from New York in March. On arriving in England, she would travel by train to Oxford, where she would live at St. Hugh's, one of the university's women's colleges.

In the meantime, some arduous preparation lay in store for her. Kober would have just five weeks in Oxford—five weeks in which to copy nearly two thousand inscriptions from Evans's photographs and drawings. To make matters more difficult, she would have to copy everything by hand: the ubiquitous office photocopier was years in the future. As she must have felt keenly, when it came to the efficient duplication of written text by a lone copyist, the techniques available to scholars in the mid-twentieth century had not advanced much beyond those employed by the Cretan scribes three thousand years before.

What techniques there were tended toward the shoddy. Kober's hand-cut index cards testify to the continued scarcity of paper years after the war ended; the little that could be had was usually substandard. Several times in her correspondence of the late 1940s she vents her frustration at the available paper, which was of such poor quality that it would barely take ink. Things were even worse in Europe, which long after the war remained beset by severe shortages. In a letter written in June 1947, after her return from England, Kober described the conditions she encountered there:

Acutely aware of these conditions, Kober spent the late 1940s sending care packages to overseas colleagues she'd never met, in a one-woman campaign to ameliorate postwar shortages. Her efforts recall those of Helene Hanff, whose epistolary memoir,
84, Charing Cross Road
, recounts her doing likewise for the staff of a London bookshop.

One of Kober's regular beneficiaries was Johannes Sundwall, the Finnish scholar who had dared defy Evans by publishing some of the Knossos inscriptions. Of all the people working on the problem, Sundwall was the one Kober respected most. His approach to the decipherment was of a piece with her own: cautious, scientific, and thorough. He was a good deal older than she; when they began corresponding, in early 1947, she was forty, he about seventy. Though they would never meet, her letters to him—warm, charming, forthcoming, and uncharacteristically girlish—suggest that Sundwall became a cherished intellectual father figure, one of the few people in the world besides John Franklin Daniel by whom she felt truly understood.

Kober had long admired Sundwall's work from afar: It had been impossible to contact Finland during the war. As a result, she was quite unprepared for the letter that arrived at her home in January 1947. “Dear Miss Kober,” Sundwall wrote, “I have read your papers on the Knossian tablets and . . . wish to compliment you on your methodical treatment of the most intricate problem that is met with in the Ancient History. . . . I am very glad that you are interested in these problems and hope for collaboration on the [most] interesting and difficult problem of decipherment.”

Her reply has the ardor of a schoolgirl who had just received a letter from a favorite film star. “Of all the people in the world,” she wrote, “you are the one with whom I have most wanted to correspond. For that very reason, I have been afraid to write. Before the war, it was because I didn't think I had anything to say worthy of your attention, and since then . . . because I didn't have your address. . . . I have carefully laid aside a copy of each article I did write (there are only two so far) to send you when the war was over.”

Besides sending Sundwall her articles, Kober would send him many parcels. One, as she wrote in an accompanying letter, contained “coffee in the bean and some soluble coffee called Nescafé”—and here, on the typewritten page, she has carefully drawn in the acute accent on the final
e
by hand—“which is not as good, but lasts longer, although the jar must be kept closed, because it attracts moisture from the air and becomes as hard as stone if one is not careful.” On another occasion she mailed him an orange, which she had coated in wax so it could withstand the journey. On a third, she made up a package of Nescafé, sugar, oranges, and rum chocolates, writing, in German, the mutual language in which Sundwall felt most comfortable, “Höffentlich sind Sie nicht Teetotaler (kennen Sie das Wort?)”—“Hopefully you're not a teetotaler (do you know the word?).” After a grateful Sundwall sent her a photograph of himself imbibing one of her gifts, she replied, almost coquettishly: “Mother and I decided it was a picture of you drinking Nescafé, and were delighted when your letter confirmed our guess. Are you sure you haven't made a mistake of about twenty years in your age? After seeing that picture, I am sure you are no more than fifty.”

Sundwall's publication of the contraband inscriptions in the 1930s had helped Kober greatly: Without them, she would not have had enough material for even preliminary conclusions. Now, a later book of Sundwall's,
Knossisches in Pylos
, which contained additional inscriptions, would prove a huge boon. It was published in Finland in 1940, but Kober was able to get a copy only in 1947, after searching for more than a year. When it arrived, as she later wrote, she “spent two very happy days . . . copying the inscriptions.”

The book also played a role in her rigorous preparation for her trip to England. Because she was under pressure to copy as many inscriptions as possible in her brief time in Oxford, she spent the weeks before her departure training for the task like an athlete preparing for the Olympics. Using the inscriptions in Sundwall's new book as test material, she put herself through rigorous time trials at the dining table. “I've timed myself,” she wrote Myres in February 1947, “and think I can copy between 100–125 inscriptions in a twelve-hour day.”

What might have made more sense, though, as she acknowledged, was practicing when her fingers were stiff with cold: Myres had warned her that indoor temperatures throughout Britain were almost unbearably low, a consequence of the continuing fuel shortage.

“[Myres] mentions having a ‘severe chill' in every letter, and is apparently confined to his room, not only because of illness, but probably also because of the lack of fuel,” she wrote John Franklin Daniel in February. “I feel guilty at the thought that I can work in a nice warm house here. I remember only too well what it was like to try and work when the best temperature our fuel ration permitted was 60 or 55.”

By March 6, the day before she sailed, Kober had reached a state of hopeful pragmatism. “I'll be content to copy what I can,” she wrote to Myres that day. “Ploughing through snow, or wading through rain, March 13 will see me at Oxford, and happy to be there.”

On the seventh, armed with writing materials and warm clothing, Kober boarded the
Queen Elizabeth
for the six-day passage to England. She planned to learn Ancient Egyptian on the boat trip over.

ONE THING KOBER did
not
bring along was the mountain of publications about Linear B that had sprung up in the half century since Evans unearthed the tablets. “Everything that's been written on Minoan is in my files—and much of it is completely worthless,” she had written Myres before she left New York. “The useful things I know practically by heart.” What she was too modest to add was that the single most vital contribution published so far was a paper of her own—the second of her three major works—which had just appeared in the
American Journal of Archaeology
.

The article was officially published in 1946, although the issue that contained it, delayed by postwar printing problems, did not actually come out until 1947, just before Kober left for England. Titled “Inflection in Linear Class B,” it picked up where her first major article, from 1945, had left off.

In the earlier paper, Kober had shown that the Minoans spoke an inflected language. Now came the real payoff from that demonstration: In a discovery that would have enormous implications for the decipherment, she now homed in on precisely what happens when
an inflected language
is written in
a syllabic script
. As a result, the complex interlacements between the Minoan language and the Minoan writing system could start to be untangled.

It was Kober's most dramatic advance so far, and there were three actors in the drama. The first were the stems of Minoan words, analogous to English stems like the noun
kiss-
. The second were the suffixes attached to Minoan words, like
-es
in the plural noun
kisses
. The third was the Linear B character that bridged the gap between stem and suffix. (If English were written syllabically, a single character—representing “se”—would be used to write the last consonant of
kiss
plus the first vowel of -
es
in the inflected word
kisses
.)

Whenever a syllabic script writes an inflected language, these three actors assume a very particular relationship. The relationship is deceptive by nature: It produces a weave that looks hard to unravel but that actually, once only a few sound-values are known, can be picked apart quite easily. In her 1945 paper, Kober had illustrated this relationship with a hypothetical example from Latin, using the verb
facere
, “to make,” whose perfect-tense stem,
fec-
, can be combined with a variety of endings:

In her 1946 paper, Kober expanded decisively on this idea. To read it is to feel the back of one's neck tingle.

As scholars knew, most Minoan words were three or four characters long. Now Kober trained her sights on one pivotal character—usually the third character in a given word. This character linked the stem of a Minoan word with its suffix, just as the
se
of
kis
se
s
does in our imaginary English syllabary. It would come to be known as the “bridging” character, and it would prove crucial in the decipherment.

To show how bridging characters work, Kober looked at the stems of several Minoan nouns. (As she explained, one could reliably spot the nouns of Minoan without being able to read Minoan: Since many of the tablets were inventories, it was a safe bet that each item in a list—“man,” “woman,” “goat,” “chariot”—was a noun. It was equally safe to assume that with rare exceptions, all nouns in a given list shared the same grammatical case.)

As she studied her nouns, Kober spotted eight that had a common ending: -
. She called this ending Case I. The nouns appearing in Case I included these: