The Riddle of the Labyrinth (29 page)
Read The Riddle of the Labyrinth Online
Authors: Margalit Fox
It wasn't that Kober saw the decipherment as a competition. “Rivalry has no place in true scholarship,” she later wrote to Emmett L. Bennett Jr., a young classicist at Yale. “We are co-workers. I will be glad to help you in any way possible. The important thing is the solution of the problem, not who solves it.” Nor would she have felt threatened by amateurs like Ventris in any case. It was that she could abide neither their unfounded guesswork nor their persistent correspondence, which, through a combination of good manners and fealty to the subject at hand, she spent too much of her scarce free time answering.
BY THE END of 1947, Daniel, continuing his campaign to bring Kober to Penn, had reason to feel encouraged. “Please send me FAST a complete list of your publications, including book reviews, classes you have taught, and the titles of lectures you have given,” he wrote her in early December. “I have just come from a meeting of the committee to appoint a successor to Kent, and . . . there was some very strong support for your nomination. . . . What this all adds up to is that I think there is an excellent chance.”
At Daniel's request, Kober solicited letters of recommendation from some of the eminent scholars who had taught her over the years. One, Franklin Edgerton, whose Sanskrit classes she attended at Yale, was happy to comply, if amazed. As he wrote her:
I am indeed astonished by the news conveyed in your letter. . . . The astonishment is not uncomplimentary to you; it is chiefly on account of the fact that I had no idea that the University of Pennsylvania ever had appointed or would appoint a woman to a major position. If they actually do offer you a full professorship at a good salary . . . it seems to me that I would take it, if I were you
.
By this time, Kober needed no persuading. “Everybody tells me this job, if it materializes, would be a wonderful opportunity,” she wrote to Daniel. “I know that too.” She continued:
It's too good to be true. I write letters and . . . talk about it, but I don't believe it. All the same, I've been figuring out what I would do if the job actually materializes. I think I would work it this way: I'd take it, and try to get a year's leave without pay from Brooklyn College. In that way, I can find out how it really works out, and if I'm not as good as I think I am, can retire gracefully at the end of the year, to everybody's relief, and come back here. If it works out, I can resign here. . . .
I'll have to figure on doing very little with Minoan that first yearâbut getting [the research center] into order and plugging away at new courses will be a very valuable experience, and Minoan is at the stage where any new information may be the clue. . . .
She closed the letter: “I've never told you I'm grateful for all you're doing. I am. It's been fun, too.”
Amid all this, Kober was attempting to arrange two overseas trips. The first was a return to England: Sir John Myres wanted her to help lobby the Clarendon Press, an imprint of Oxford University Press, to speed the publication of
Scripta Minoa II
, which had ground to a halt amid postwar retrenchments. In the spring of 1948, she finally secured passageâno small trick, given the austerities still affecting ocean travel then. “First Class. Ouch!” Kober wrote Daniel in late April. “But that was the only way I could go.” She would sail from New York on the RMS
Mauretania
on July 21 and reach Oxford by the end of the month. She would sail home from Liverpool on September 10, arriving in Brooklyn just before school began.
The second trip was to Crete, where Myres wanted her to go to check Evans's transcriptions against the tablets in the Heraklion Museum, provided they were accessible by the time she got there. But even if they were, she had neither the time nor the money to make the journey: Brooklyn College would grant her only six months'
unpaid
leave. “Six months is ample time for me to starve to death, since I've spent all my money last year,” she had written to Daniel in late 1947. She addedâand it is wrenching to read in retrospectâ“Six months mean very little to me, but of course, they mean a lot to Myres.” (Myres would outlive her by four years.)
“My only solution,” Kober wrote, “would be to stop all scholarly work for six months, write a detective story and hope it would be a best-seller.” Of course, her body of work, read in sequence,
was
a detective story, and a great one, though it would take Michael Ventris building on the foundation she erected to solve the mystery. In the end, Kober's worries about the Cretan trip were moot. The Knossos tablets remained in hiding for years, and she would never get to see them.
IN EARLY 1948, Kober's state-of-the-field article appeared in the
American Journal of Archaeology
under the crisp title “The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory.” Erudite, authoritative, and coolly polemical, it began:
The basic distinction between fact and theory is clear enough. A fact is a reality, an actuality, something that exists; a theory states that something might be, or could be, or should be. . . . In dealing with the past we are concerned, not with something that exists, but with something that has existed. Our facts are limited to those things [from] the past which still exist; everything else is theory, which may range all the way from practical certainty to utter impossibility, depending on its relationship to known facts.
The heart of the paper picked up where her 1946 article had left off, with the critical third characterâthe “bridging” characterâin Linear B words. From that character, Kober had long known, sprang a network of relationships among the sounds of the Cretan language. Now, in this paper, she began to plot those relationships by means of a grid.
As before, Kober paid particular attention to what happens when an inflected language bumps up against a syllabic script. By this time she had discovered additional words that seemed to fit the pattern of inflection she had previously described. In the new paper, her expanded paradigm contains six words (she believed they were all nouns) in each of three casesâsix sets of “triplets,” as Ventris would call them. As it happened, the three words in Column B (
and
) would play a critical role in the decipherment.
Once again, Kober homed in on the third sign of each word (or, for shorter words, like those in Columns D and E, the second sign). This was the “bridging” character, whose function she had illustrated so elegantly in her previous article. It is this character that is at the heart of the matrix, or grid, that she unveiled in the new paper. The grid is modestâjust five signs by two signsâbut it presents, for the first time anywhere, some
relative
sound-values for characters in the script. Kober did not invent the concept of the grid, nor did she claim to: Its use in archaeological decipherment dates to the seventeenth century. But her great innovation, as Maurice Pope writes in
The Story of Archaeological Decipherment
, “was the idea of constructing such a grid
in the abstract
. . .without settling what particular consonant or vowel it might be that a particular set of signs had in common.”
Captioned “Beginning of a Tentative Phonetic Pattern,” Kober's grid looked like this:
Each symbol in the grid is one of Kober's “bridging” characters, and each character's position marks, so to speak, its phonetic coordinates. Reading across Row 1, for instance, we see that
and
start with the same consonant but end in different vowelsâwhatever those consonants and vowels might be. Reading down Column 1 tells us that
and
start with different consonants but end in the same vowel. Though the specific sound-values remained unknown, Kober's grid made it possible to show the
relative
relationships among these ten characters. A comparable grid for Englishâand here the sound-values have been assigned arbitrarilyâmight look like this: