The Riddle of the Labyrinth (27 page)

She closed the letter, “I will be content with whatever decision is made.”

The decision reached Kober in England at the end of March 1947: Her application had been denied. The letter from the foundation gave no reason beyond the generic one, that the number of applicants far exceeded the funds available. It seems fair to assume, though, that her constitutional caution, and correspondingly slender record of publication (just the kind of tangible evidence grant-givers like to see), had at least something to do with it.

Characteristically, she made the best of it. “I am in a way relieved, since my financial condition will be better if I go back to work in September,” she wrote in a gracious reply to Moe. “With this year of solid work behind me, I should make progress fast.” But the rejection was among the first in a series of deep disappointments that would define the last years of her life.

THE FIRST DISAPPOINTMENT had come four months earlier, at the end of 1946. That November, on the same day she wrote to Myres asking to see the Knossos inscriptions, Kober wrote a similar letter to an American archaeologist, Carl W. Blegen of the University of Cincinnati. Blegen was sitting on another cache of inscriptions altogether: hundreds of clay tablets, inscribed with what looked a great deal like Linear B, that he had unearthed at Pylos, on the Greek mainland, in 1939.

Blegen was even luckier than Evans had been. Where it had taken Evans a week to find his first tablet, it took Blegen less than a day. As the story went, Blegen arrived in Pylos in April 1939 and looked around for a place to dig. He chose a nearby hill and asked its owner if he could excavate there. Permission was granted on one condition: that Blegen's workmen not disturb the ancient olive trees growing on the hillside. Blegen agreed to dig a meandering trench that would spare the trees. As a result, he liked to say afterward, Pallas Athene, the Greek goddess of wisdom, who had given man the olive tree, rewarded him.

Early the next morning, Blegen's Greek workmen began digging the crooked trench. Almost at once, one of the men approached him, holding an object he had lifted from the earth. “
Grammata
,” he said, extending his hand to Blegen. It was the Greek word for writing. In the man's hand was a clay tablet, much like those from Knossos, inscribed with similar symbols. Digging deeper, the crew began to uncover the ruins of a small Mycenaean palace. Blegen named it the Palace of Nestor, after the Homeric hero fabled to have ruled there. Inside the palace was a room filled with tablets.

The tablets had been written in about 1200 B.C.—a good two hundred years after those of Knossos—but the symbols on them looked tantalizingly like Linear B. There were about six hundred tablets, roughly a third as many as Evans had found, but each tended to contain more text. Blegen continued work at Pylos until the fall of 1939. Then, with the outbreak of World War II in Europe, he locked the tablets away in a vault in the Bank of Greece. There they remained, until long after the war.

Blegen's discovery threatened to upend Evans's cherished theory of Minoan supremacy: Though Evans had argued that the mainland was a rude, unlettered outpost of the high Cretan culture, here was evidence that a script—much like Linear B—had been used to record the workings of a
Mycenaean
palace. Worse still for Evans's theory was the fact that the palace at Pylos had clearly been a going concern two centuries after Knossos was burned and the Minoan civilization vanquished.

Evans, by then in his late eighties, did not comment publicly on Blegen's find, though he held fast to his ideal of Minoan domination. By his lights (and so his supporters argued), Pylos was merely a Cretan colony that had adopted the Minoan script and had the good fortune to endure beyond the destruction of Knossos. What was certain was that in the field of Aegean prehistory, Blegen's discovery was the most important since Evans had unearthed the Knossos tablets four decades earlier. As a result, every scholar working on Linear B was itching to see the Pylos inscriptions.

Kober's letter to Blegen was, if anything, more deferential than the one to Myres. But Blegen refused her request. “The difficulties in the way of granting it have arisen not from a dog-in-the-manger attitude on our part,” he wrote in reply, “but from considerations of a practical nature. The tablets themselves are still packed away underground in Athens in a bomb-proof vault, where they remained during the war, and when they will be brought out again is wholly uncertain. . . . On this side we have no negatives, but only a single set of photographs which are in use all the time. We likewise have but one complete set of accurate transcriptions, also constantly needed in our own work. Under these circumstances we felt ourselves obliged to refuse similar requests in the past; and the situation has not changed today.”

Though access to the Pylos inscriptions would let Michael Ventris crack the code, Kober never got to see more than a tiny handful of them: Blegen's demurral dragged on for years. It was a setback but not a shock. “I am a pessimist,” she wrote in 1947. “I prepare for the best, but expect the worst. Usually I am pleasantly surprised.”

She had more than enough to do in any case. There were the mountains of data from Oxford to sort and analyze, sign lists and vocabulary lists to draw up, and index cards to be cut, punched, and inked. (She had been unable to copy all two thousand inscriptions, but she did manage to copy most of them, bringing the number at her disposal to almost eighteen hundred.) She had also accepted an invitation from John Franklin Daniel to serve on the editorial board of the
American Journal of Archaeology
—to help him, as he wrote, vet manuscripts on Minoan sent in “by crack-pots.” (“I rather consider myself an expert on crack-pots,” she replied in acceptance, no doubt contemplating the wild, Polynesian-infused theories of some of her more ardent correspondents.)

Also at Daniel's behest, she would soon start work on her third major paper, which would prove the most important of her career. Kober had already made two major advances: demonstrating that the language of the script was inflected, and identifying the “bridging” characters on which the writing of inflected words hinged. In her third article, she would illuminate a set of vital, long-hidden relationships among the characters of Linear B—the discovery that made Ventris's decipherment possible.

I
N SEPTEMBER 1947, KOBER'S FELLOWSHIP year came to an end, and before long, as she wrote ruefully to John Franklin Daniel, she was back “in academic harness” at Brooklyn College. A few months earlier, contemplating her return, she had written to Sundwall, “It must be quite wonderful when teaching is finally over and one can say to oneself that one has only to learn.” (Sundwall was by then retired.) But before the year was out, a joint effort by Sundwall and Daniel would offer her the tantalizing possibility of escape.

At the time, the Linear B tablets remained hidden in Europe, those from Knossos stored in the Heraklion Museum, those from Pylos locked away in Athens. Like many Europeans, Sundwall feared another war on the continent. In the summer of 1947, he wrote to Daniel, suggesting that a safe haven for the tablets be established somewhere in the United States. Daniel seized on the idea at once.

Young (he was in his mid-thirties), brilliant, passionate about Aegean prehistory, and possessed of what appeared to be boundless energy, Daniel seemed precisely the person to realize the plan. “Compared to you a hurricane is just a gentle breeze—except that you're constructive,” Kober once wrote him admiringly. Philadelphia was chosen as the tablets' prospective home: In the event of another war, it seemed less likely than New York to be attacked. Daniel set about the delicate diplomatic business of persuading the University of Pennsylvania to create an institute devoted to the study of Cretan scripts, to be known as the Center for Minoan Linguistic Research.

He next set about recruiting Kober as its head. “You are the person in this country who is working most actively in the material,” he wrote her in early September 1947. “Would you be interested and available for such a project if it were to become feasible?”

With typical pragmatic pessimism, Kober demurred at first. “I have a job which, while far from ideal in many ways . . . does pay well,” she replied. “I don't intend to keep it all my life, but at present the kind of work I'd really like”—pure research—“is open only to men.”

In the coming weeks, Daniel wore her down. “Dangling . . . the Institute in front of my nose like that, when all I'm teaching this term is Greek and Roman literature in Translation, and high-school level Vergil, is almost more than I can bear,” she wrote him in late September. “I daren't say no, and I daren't say yes.”

For Kober, finances were a major concern. At Brooklyn, she wrote, she was paid “a big salary for a woman teacher,” more than $6,000 a year—roughly $62,000 today. “I know enough about academic salaries for women to realize that financially I can't do better, at least for another ten years,” she told Daniel. “All the same, if it weren't that I have Mother to consider, that wouldn't make any difference.”

But over the next few months, as Daniel continued his backstage machinations, the job began to tug at her increasingly. By chance Roland Kent, a well-known professor of Indo-European linguistics, had just retired from Penn, and Daniel hit upon his departure as a way of bringing Kober to the university, with her duties divided between running the Minoan institute and teaching classes on subjects like Greek phonology, a topic much dearer to her heart than high-school-level Vergil.

“Don't count on it too much, because I am still pretty young in university politics and it may well be that my word will carry even less weight than I timidly think,” Daniel cautioned her by mail that fall. “Furthermore I am afraid that there is something of a prejudice against giving faculty appointments to women. How strong it is I don't know, but will soon find out.”

After several months, Daniel was able to report that his efforts at Penn were going slowly but well. If he could arrange it, he wrote Kober in December, he would make a course on Cretan scripts part of her portfolio there. With that, she was hooked. “Your latest letter . . . has me sitting here with my tongue hanging out, and that's bad,” she replied. She continued:

As Kober and Daniel both knew, the gears of university administration grind with the speed of geologic time, and there would be no word on the job right away. In the meantime, though, he had conceived something equally important to occupy her.

It is hard to imagine now, but among their other effects, the shortages of the postwar years made the dissemination of ideas among scholars a real challenge: The process depended crucially on printing, which remained an uncertain proposition, and paper, which remained a scarce commodity. In the late 1940s many Europeans still had scant access to American academic journals, and vice versa. In the autumn of 1945, Kober lamented that the Brooklyn College library's most recent copy of
Archiv Orientálni
, an important Czech journal, was from 1938, “as might be expected.” In 1946, she had to enlist the aid of the Czech Consulate to obtain a copy of Hrozný's “decipherment” of Linear B.

The number of people working seriously on the Cretan scripts was so tiny, their mutual contact so limited, and their collective knowledge so atomized, that most were effectively laboring in isolation. Beyond this small group was a larger one of “non-Minoan” archaeologists and classicists, who knew far less about the scripts than they might. What was needed, Daniel realized, was one overarching article, disseminated as widely as possible, that laid out precisely the current state of knowledge about the scripts. He knew just the person for the job, and in early September 1947, he wrote to her, soliciting the piece for the
American Journal of Archaeology
: