The Riddle of the Labyrinth (28 page)

Though Daniel and Kober's friendship was conducted almost entirely by mail (they met only a few times, usually at scholarly meetings), there existed between them an intellectual sympathy so deep it bordered on telepathy: As it happened, she was just then thinking of writing a state-of-the-field article herself. “One of the remarkable things about you is that you always anticipate what I'm going to say,” she wrote by return mail. “I think your suggestion about an article on what is known about Minoan just suits the situation. It will also make the Guggenheim Foundation happy, since it will be a sort of summary of my year's work.”

By late September, she had embarked on the torturous process of drafting the paper. “About the article—I hope it comes up to expectations, but I'm beginning to have my doubts,” she wrote to Daniel. “My typewriter seems to have taken the bit into its mouth (how's that for a mixed metaphor). At any rate, what has come out isn't at all what I expected.” By early October, she was hard at work on the fourth draft; by the middle of the month, as she wrote to Daniel, she had completed “the sixth draft (durn it!).” Throughout the article, she was careful not to cite any inscriptions from the still-unpublished Knossos tablets, honoring her promise to Myres.

In late October, Kober sent Daniel the finished manuscript. “This is the best I can do,” she wrote. “I should have rewritten one or two pages, but I'm afraid to touch the typescript, for fear that I will feel like writing another draft. I'm sick and tired of it, truth to tell. I've worked harder on this than on anything I've ever written, and doubt that it's worth beans. If you don't think it's worth printing—well, I agree.” In fact, the paper would be the most important of her career, and the one that furnished the most significant step forward in the decipherment thus far.

IN MID-DECEMBER 1947, before her article appeared, Kober made what she called a “slight discovery.” Sifting her cards, she had managed to pinpoint the special function of the character
, colloquially known to investigators as “button.” Though the discovery was small, the noteworthy thing about it is that it was she, and not Michael Ventris, who made it: Until now, historians have attributed it to Ventris, who reached the same conclusion independently more than three years later, in January 1951.

What first Kober and then Ventris noticed was that
kept cropping up in a very particular spot: at the ends of words. As Kober knew from perusing the tablets' inventories, many of those words were nouns. In addition, each “buttoned” noun typically followed another noun, resulting in this characteristic sequence:

Though she still had no idea how
was pronounced, Kober realized that in the language of the tablets, it must be the conjunction “and.” The symbol was functioning as a kind of suffix: Tacked on to the end of one noun, it linked that noun to the one before it.

As Kober knew, “and” can function as a suffix (or prefix) in other languages. In Latin, “and” (
-que
) can be tacked on to the end of a noun, linking it to the previous one. (A well-known example is the phrase
Senatus Populus
que
Romanus
—“the senate
and
the people of Rome”—abbreviated SPQR and ubiquitous on Roman coins, documents, and the like.) In Hebrew, “and” (
v-
) attaches to the
beginning
of a noun, linking it to the noun before:
tohu
v
abohu
, “without form
and
void,” from the book of Genesis.

Kober concluded—correctly—that
worked similarly in the Minoan language. But she was never able to make her finding public, and as a result never got credit for it. This was partly an accident of timing: She made the discovery on December 14, 1947, too late to prepare a paper on the subject for the year-end annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, as she would have liked. “Too bad I didn't discover it a couple of weeks ago,” she wrote Daniel regretfully.

She may not have had time in any case. By the late 1940s she had become enmeshed in a gargantuan, long-distance effort to proofread, fact-check, and type Myres's work on
Scripta Minoa II
. Though to Kober, as Professor Thomas Palaima points out, the job had the quality of a sacred duty—one that might let her ensure the absolute accuracy of the material Myres had inherited from Evans—it was proving to be a frustrating, unrewarding, and labor-intensive enterprise that at bottom was little more than secretarial work. And she was carrying a full load at Brooklyn College all the while.

Even had Kober been able to make her findings on
public, it is quite possible that Ventris would not have learned of them anyway. Her narrative and his don't truly begin to converge until the spring of 1948, when he started corresponding with Linear B investigators around the globe. From the letters between them, which begin that March, it is plain that Kober's work remained unavailable in Britain. In a letter to her in May 1948, Ventris acknowledges receiving copies of her articles—“I'm extremely glad to have them,” he wrote—in a manner that strongly suggests he had not seen them before.

Kober and Ventris would meet only once, briefly, in England, in the summer of 1948, and there is no direct record of what either thought of the other. But it is clear from the absence of the kind of warm, respectful correspondence that Kober maintained with colleagues like Daniel and Sundwall that she did not hold Ventris in especially high esteem.

She had no use for amateurs, many of whom persisted in writing her with their latest theories on the Cretan scripts. One of her most chronic correspondents—whose letters are charming to read today, but to Kober were undoubtedly a source of immense irritation—was William T. M. Forbes, a Cornell University entomologist and dabbler in ancient scripts. (It was he who thought the Minoan language was a form of Polynesian.) His letters to Kober, written over a period of years, contain page upon page of unsupported linguistic speculation before closing with cheery sign-offs like “But now back to the Lepidoptera for a time.” Though Kober's replies have not been preserved, it is evident from Forbes's letters that she took the time to write him back, at pedagogical length, which left him grateful if unpersuaded. Her handwritten notes in the margins of his letters to her (“No!” “Right!!”) attest to their claim on her time.

To Kober, Ventris appeared to be yet another hobbyist awash in wild, unfounded enthusiasms. Neither linguist nor archaeologist, he was an architect who worked on the tablets in his spare time. Their correspondence had an inauspicious beginning: His first known letter to her, on March 26, 1948, contains a slew of things that must surely have set her teeth on edge. “I should be very interested to hear how far you have got at present, and particularly if you have any ideas on phonetic values,” Ventris wrote. He restated his conviction that the Minoan language was a form of Etruscan, a belief he had first made public in a 1940 article in the
American Journal of Archaeology
, published when he was a teenager. Neither his talk of sound-values nor his identification of a specific language as Minoan would have sat well with Kober, who remained resolutely agnostic on both subjects to the end of her life.

“Minoan is only a part-time job with me,” Ventris wrote in the same letter, “and there is always the problem of getting enough material to work on. In fact, I don't feel like coming out publicly with any more theories until I've laid my hands on all the available material.” He went on to describe setting up a network of Linear B characters that had consonants or vowels in common—relationships Kober had already described in her influential paper of 1946, “Inflection in Linear Class B.” He also talked of setting up a “grid” by which those shared consonants and vowels could be plotted, which was precisely what Kober had done by then in the state-of-the-field paper Daniel had commissioned.

Later in the spring of 1948, on the verge of quitting his day job to immerse himself completely in Linear B, Ventris wrote her, “At the moment I'm engaged in a rather tricky architectural competition, but after that I think I shall have to devote the rest of the year whole time to Minoan, because it isn't really worth doing in fits and starts,” a line that to Kober must have fairly screamed “rich dilettante.”