The Riddle of the Labyrinth (32 page)

Their first order of business was to compile a definitive sign list—a signary, paleographers call it—containing all the characters used in the mainland and Cretan versions of the script. This was no simple task: The Knossos inscriptions alone still lacked a standard signary after almost half a century. Now, with the Pylos material added, the problem became even more difficult. In the end, the Linear B signary would not be finalized until 1951, a project completed by Bennett and Ventris the year after Kober's death.

“There are a few signs that must be added to our lists, and in my case, at least, all the vocabulary lists must be revised,” Kober wrote Bennett that June. “You can imagine what a job it is to go through all the inscriptions and check these things again. . . . I must now convince Sir John Myres that the sign list must be changed to include [the Pylos data], and he does not want to do it. I do not want to do it either, but there is now no doubt in my mind that it must be done.”

There were also thousands of vocabulary words to reconcile, and Bennett began compiling a master list of words from both places. He came across many Knossos words that were not found at Pylos—all of which he asked Kober to correct, check, and annotate. These, too, were dispatched to Brooklyn.

IN 1949, KOBER came out with a noteworthy article that solved two enduring small mysteries in a single stroke. One was the problem of telling male from female animals in paired logograms like
and
. The other was an analogous problem: how to tell apart the two words—
and
—that almost certainly meant “boy” and “girl” but were likewise indistinguishable. As her paper showed, the same key unlocked both questions, and it had been hiding in plain sight in the tablets all along.

The solution centered on the only Linear B word whose meaning was known beyond doubt—“total.” The word appeared again and again at the bottom of inventories on Linear B tablets, and as scholars from Evans onward had noted, the Minoan scribes routinely wrote it in two forms:
and
. Though the pronunciation of these forms was unknown, each obviously had two syllables, and the initial syllables were obviously identical. As Kober's major work had shown, it was also clear that the second syllable of each word began with the same consonant but ended with different vowels. But if both forms meant “total,” then why, Kober asked herself, did they need to differ at all? She began to look closely at the context in which each form occurred.

As Evans had recognized, some of the inventories on the tablets were lists of names—names of soldiers, names of slaves, names of workers in various trades. Lists marked with the “man” logogram,
, obviously contained men's names. The famous twenty-four-line tablet from Knossos, known as the “Man” tablet, displays the logogram at the end of each line, just before the numeral:

Other inventories, marked with the logogram
, listed women's names.

As Kober studied the inventories, she spied a pattern. Lists of men's names always used one particular form of “total”:
. Lists of women's names always used the other form:
. The difference in form, she realized, could well represent a difference in inflection—specifically, a difference in gender. Many languages inflect their nouns and adjectives for gender: In Spanish, for instance the masculine noun
viejo
means “old man”; its feminine counterpart,
vieja
, means “old woman.” Kober deduced that in the language of the tablets,
was a masculine form of “total” and
a feminine.