The Riddle of the Labyrinth (26 page)

To visualize the role of bridging characters in a “science of graphics,” one must mentally split them down the middle, like the contested baby in the King Solomon story, with each “half” claimed by a different syllable:

This, Kober realized, was precisely what caused the change in the third syllable of the nouns in her paradigm, repeated here:

It was as though these “bridging” characters, too, had been split down the middle, incorporating the end of the stem and the beginning of the suffix in equal measure. This accounted for the change in spelling from
to
in Case III:

This one-character bridge may look like a small thing. But in isolating its function, Kober had taken an immense step forward. “If this interpretation is correct,” she wrote in her 1946 paper, “we have in our hands a means for finding out how some of the signs of the Linear Class B script are related to one another.” In the example above, for instance, we can tell instantly that
and
share a consonant but have different vowels, just as the Latin syllables “vum” and “vo” do.

With a foot in one syllable and another in the next, bridging characters were the linchpins of Minoan words. By identifying and describing them, Kober had found a way of establishing the
relative
relationships among the characters of the script without having to know any of their actual sound-values. And on this linchpin the decipherment would turn, although she would not live to see it.

ON MARCH 13, 1947, when Kober arrived in England, she immediately regretted not having practiced copying with stiffened fingers. It was even colder there than she had expected: She had arrived at the tail end of the brutal winter of 1946–47, famous even now in the annals of British weather. “I've been devoting all the time available to copying Minoan inscriptions, sometimes a more difficult job than you'd think, when the room temperatures hover around forty degrees,” she wrote Henry Allen Moe, the secretary of the Guggenheim Foundation, from Oxford in early April.

Having access to so much data was a decidedly mixed blessing. On the one hand, if she could copy it all in her five weeks in England, her store of available inscriptions would increase tenfold. On the other, it would mean that she would have to start her painstaking analytic work all over again. It had taken her five years just to analyze the two hundred inscriptions she already had.

Despite the spartan conditions, Kober reveled in British university life. “I had a most delightful time, staying at St. Hugh's College as a sort of honorary member of the Senior Common Room, and finding out what life at Oxford was really like from the inside,” she wrote John Franklin Daniel afterward. “Everybody was so nice, I've come back with a severe case of swollen head.”

She, in turn, had nothing but praise for Sir John Myres. “He says what he thinks, firmly, decisively, and oh, so politely,” she wrote after her trip. “I can hardly realize I have seen him for only six weeks, once. He is a wonderful man.”

Myres let her copy whatever she wanted from Evans's trove of inscriptions, with one proviso: She was to publish nothing based on the material until
Scripta Minoa II
came out. This did not discourage her. The book was due out in early 1948, less than a year away. It would take her at least that long to analyze the welter of new data.

Kober left England on April 17. Before she sailed, she offered to help Myres prepare the manuscript of
Scripta Minoa II
for publication. The sooner the volume was out, she reasoned, the sooner she would be able to make her own discoveries known to the scholarly public.

ON APRIL 25, when the
Queen Elizabeth
docked in New York, it brought Kober home to an ocean of work. “I have so much to do, I hardly am aware that spring is coming,” she wrote to Daniel shortly afterward. “My trip to England was successful beyond my wildest dreams—in fact, too successful, since Sir John insists that I go to Crete to check the originals of the Knossos inscriptions for him, and I don't know how the President of Brooklyn College will feel about my running off in the middle of the next semester.”

A few months earlier, knowing how much time it would take to analyze the Oxford data, Kober had requested a renewal of her Guggenheim Fellowship. Her letter to Henry Allen Moe, from January 1947, offers a masterly account not only of her approach to the decipherment but also of her willingness to forsake security for science:

“Dear Mr. Moe,” she wrote: