The Riddle of the Labyrinth (3 page)

Today, in an era of popular nonfiction that professes to find secret messages lurking in the Hebrew Bible, and of novels whose valiant heroes follow clues encoded in great works of European art, it is bracing to recall the story of Linear B—a real-life quest to solve a prehistoric mystery, starring flesh-and-blood detectives with nothing more than wit, passion, and determination at their disposal.

Over time, two besides Evans emerged as best equipped to crack the code. One, Michael Ventris, was a young English architect with a mournful past, whose fascination with ancient scripts had begun as a boyhood hobby. The other, Alice Kober, was a fiery American classicist—the lone woman among the serious investigators—whose immense contribution to the decipherment has been all but lost to history. What all three shared was a ferocious intelligence, a nearly photographic memory for the strange Cretan symbols, and a single-mindedness of purpose that could barely be distinguished from obsession. Of the three, the two most gifted would die young, one under swift, strange circumstances that may have been a consequence of the decipherment itself.

Considered one of the most prodigious intellectual feats of modern times, the unraveling of Linear B has been likened to Crick and Watson's mapping of the structure of DNA for the magnitude of its achievement. The decipherment was done entirely by hand, without the aid of computers or a single bilingual inscription. It was accomplished, crumb by crumb, in the only way possible: by finding, interpreting, and meticulously following a series of tiny clues hidden within the script itself. And in the end, the answer to the riddle defied everyone's expectations, including the decipherer's own.

To Ventris, the solution brought worldwide acclaim. But before long it also brought doubt, despair, personal and professional ruin, and, some observers believe, untimely death.

All this was decades in the future that March day at Knossos, when the first brittle tablets emerged from the ground. But of one thing Arthur Evans was already certain. Guided by the smallest of clues, he had come to Crete in search of writing from a time before Europe was thought to
have
writing. And there, he now knew beyond doubt, he had found it.

E
VANS CAME TO CRETE TO fill a void. In 1876, Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman with a burning interest in the classics, began excavating a site on the Greek mainland, about seventy miles southwest of Athens. The site he chose was fabled as the home of Mycenae, the ancient city known from Homer as the kingdom of Agamemnon, brother-in-law of the beautiful Helen of Troy.

As Evans would on Crete a quarter century later, Schliemann unearthed the relics of an advanced Bronze Age civilization, this one lying two hundred miles north of Crete, over the sea. Mycenae had been a real, prosperous, well-run society that flourished in the second millennium B.C. Before long, the most visible Bronze Age ruins there could be dated to about 1600 to 1200 B.C.: In the late 1880s and afterward, the distinguished archaeologist Flinders Petrie uncovered Mycenaean trade goods, including ceramic vessels, while excavating Egyptian sites of known date.

Schliemann was already famous for unearthing vanished worlds. In the early 1870s, he had uncovered what he believed to be Troy itself, at Hisarlik, in present-day Turkey. There, where King Priam was fabled to have reigned, and where a long, bloody war was said to have raged after Priam's son, Paris, abducted Helen from her home in Sparta, Schliemann dug fruitlessly for several years. Shortly before the dig was to end, he later wrote, he came upon a golden hoard: gold diadems and goblets and buttons and earrings and rings. It would be known ever after as the treasure of Priam.

Schliemann's excavation methods, which involved the wholesale hacking away of huge, potentially fruitful layers of soil, distress many modern archaeologists. Over the years, the authenticity of some of his finds, both at Troy and Mycenae, has been questioned. Today, some critics view him more as tomb robber than archaeologist.

What Schliemann's archaeology lacked in scientific rigor it amply made up in romantic fervor. Driving him to dig at both sites was the desire to prove that Homer's epic poems, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, were factual works of history. (The poems are now thought to have been composed in the eighth or seventh century B.C. Schliemann's earnest belief that they were nonfiction is one that few scholars, now as then, have been inclined to share.)

But Schliemann's work remains important for having taken civilizations thought to be the figments of tale-tellers and placed them, at least possibly, within the realm of history. At Hisarlik, he helped animate the heroes of the Trojan War, fought, some sources say, in the thirteenth or twelfth century B.C. At Mycenae, too, he brought the world of the Aegean Bronze Age to light, showing that a high civilization was already in full flower on the Greek mainland a thousand years before Classical times. Ever since Schliemann dug at Mycenae, the span of early Greek history from the sixteenth to the thirteenth centuries B.C.—the era when this mainland kingdom was at its height—has been known as the Mycenaean Age.

Mycenae had been a walled citadel. It was made of stone blocks so massive, the scholar John Chadwick wrote, that “the later Greeks understandably concluded that the walls had been built by giants.” Still standing in Schliemann's day was the city's famed Lion Gate, a portal of enormous blocks topped with two lions in carved relief. It was a splendid feat of engineering, yet so different stylistically from the triangular pediments and fluted columns of Classical Greece. Digging down into the circle of deep “shaft graves” inside the city's walls, Schliemann brought up priceless golden artifacts, engraved gems, silver vessels, and other treasures.

But just as striking was what Schliemann
didn't
find. Despite the great refinement of the Mycenaean kingdom, despite the well-oiled administration that had clearly sustained it, there was no sign of writing anywhere. Though Schliemann excavated on a typically grand scale, pouring his vast personal resources into the dig, he turned up no clay tablets, no inscriptions cut in stone—no evidence whatsoever that this sophisticated mainland society had been literate.

This bothered Evans. Like many people, Arthur Evans had followed the newspaper accounts of Schliemann's dig with rapt interest. Surely, Evans thought, so advanced a civilization, with all its attendant bureaucracy, would have had a means of keeping written records. Mycenaean society was far too complex—too
competent
—he believed, not to have been acquainted with writing in some form. As Evans would later explain, his Victorian worldview on unabashed display, “It seemed incredible that [such] a civilisation . . . could in the department of writing, have been below the stage attained by Red Indians.”

Perhaps the Mycenaeans had written on perishable materials, like palm leaves, bark, or hide. But by the Victorian era, beguiling hints that they had written on sturdier stuff had begun to surface. In the early 1890s, Chrēstos Tsountas, an associate of Schliemann working at Mycenae, unearthed a clay amphora—a type of two-handled vessel—with three “linear” signs incised on one handle. Nearby, in a Mycenaean tomb, Tsountas unearthed a stone vase whose handle was engraved with four or five linear symbols. Elsewhere on the mainland, linear signs were found painted on a few pieces of pottery.

There were also hints on Crete. In the late 1870s, the remains of a Bronze Age wall were exposed at Knossos, on the site at which Evans eventually dug. In the early 1880s, one of the wall's huge gypsum blocks was discovered to be inscribed with a series of linear symbols, which scholars quickly dismissed as “masons' marks.” Strikingly, the wall at Knossos and the amphora at Mycenae, separated by two hundred miles of sea, had a symbol in common, the character
. The more Evans considered the question, the more he became convinced that some form of writing had existed in the Aegean in Mycenaean days.

Evans was only in his twenties when Schliemann dug at Mycenae, but he already possessed the characteristics necessary for a world-class archaeologist: tirelessness, fearlessness, boundless curiosity, wealth, and myopia. By the 1890s, when he began to attack the problem in earnest, he had already traveled to remote corners of the globe; become a recognized expert on ancient coins; lived for long periods in the Balkans, where he was a passionate advocate of the Slavic nationalist cause; and been appointed keeper, as the head curator was known, of the Ashmolean, the distinguished archaeological museum in Oxford. Armed with these unassailable assets, Evans went forth to find evidence of writing in Mycenaean times. Clue after clue would point him toward Crete.

Excavation was in Evans's blood. His father, Sir John Evans, a wealthy paper manufacturer, was also a distinguished amateur geologist, archaeologist, and numismatist. Known among his contemporaries as Evans the Great, John Evans “helped to lay the foundations of modern geology, paleontology, anthropology, and archaeology despite the fact that he could dedicate only Sundays and holidays to the dim past,” Sylvia L. Horwitz wrote in
The Find of a Lifetime
, her biography of Arthur Evans.

The eldest of five children of John and Harriet Dickinson Evans, Arthur John Evans was born on July 8, 1851. He was reared with his siblings in the Hertfordshire countryside in a grand house overflowing with fossils, prehistoric stone tools, arrowheads, Roman coins, and ancient pottery, the stuff of their father's weekend trade. Arthur was a sober, curious boy who could spend hours intently studying old coins, though he seemed indifferent to conventional book-learning. (Because Arthur had not mastered Latin grammar by the age of six, as his father before him had done, his paternal grandmother confided to Harriet her fear that the child was “a bit of a dunce.”)