The Riddle of the Labyrinth (35 page)

That spring, a long article by Kober appeared in the journal
Language
. The article—a joint review of volume 2 of Hrozný's “decipherment” of Minoan together with a comparable “decipherment” by the Bulgarian linguist Vladimir Georgiev—is her last publication. Her impassioned brief for a science of archaeological decipherment, meticulously outlined in the review, reads like an urgent parting shot:

On April 17, 1950, returning the latest set of
Scripta Minoa II
proofs, Kober wrote an astonishing letter to Myres. It is short and to the point, but it is more naked, and more angry, than anything in her entire correspondence. “Dear Sir John,” it begins:

Then, at the close of the letter, a remarkable about-face:

On the morning of May 16, 1950, Alice Kober died at her home in Brooklyn, at the age of forty-three. The letter to Myres is her last known to anyone. Perhaps that is fitting: For all its pulsating rage, it ends with a vision of Paradise.

London, 1936

T
HE KNOSSOS TABLETS, SO LONG in the ground, were under glass now, on display in London at Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy of Arts. Curated by Sir Arthur Evans, the exhibition honored the fiftieth anniversary of the British School at Athens, the archaeological institute of which he was a founder. On this autumn day, Evans himself, at eighty-five the eminence grise of Old World archaeology, was passing through the gallery. There, he came face-to-face with a group of boys on a school trip. They were sixth-formers—sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds—plus one younger schoolmate who had tagged along to see the ancient artifacts.

Evans was fond of children, and he took it upon himself to give the boys an impromptu private tour. They soon found themselves before a glass case that held some of the tablets he had unearthed at Knossos. Despite all efforts, Evans told them, the mysterious writing on them still could not be read.

As was widely recounted afterward, a shy treble arose from the knot of schoolboys. “Did you say the tablets haven't been deciphered, Sir?” asked the group's youngest member, a boy of fourteen, in polite excitement. The boy's name was Michael Ventris.

Though the episode marked the start of Ventris's obsession with this particular script, he had already been in thrall to ancient writing for half his young life. Endowed with a knife-edge logical mind and an almost unnatural facility for acquiring foreign languages, he was certainly the most natively brilliant of the three major players in the Linear B story. He was also very likely—though here the playing field was practically level—the most obsessed.

But the most remarkable thing about Ventris by far is that he was neither an archaeologist like Evans nor a classicist like Kober nor a scholar in any other field that might have made him a likely candidate to solve the riddle of the script. In fact, he had never even been to college. (In those years, British architectural training took place in professional schools, not in universities, and Ventris's formal education in any subject that might be considered grist for a career in archaeological decipherment had ended in his late teens.)

Like many of the amateurs who tackled the script, Ventris spent years juggling unverifiable speculations, choosing a favorite candidate for the language of the tablets almost at the start. Unlike them, however, his acute rationality, superb gift for pattern recognition, and profound appreciation of mathematically elegant approaches to problem solving of every kind made him, once he finally read and digested Kober's articles, spectacularly well equipped to use her methods to reach a solution.

Since that day at the Royal Academy, Ventris had lived with the script more intimately than anyone except Kober. At boarding school, he read about it under the covers by flashlight after lights-out. While still in his teens, he wrote fervent letters about it to Evans. At eighteen, he wrote a long analytical article on Linear B that was published in a scholarly journal. In the 1940s, he took it with him to war.

If Linear B exerted a greater hold on Ventris than it did on anyone else, there was ample cause. In his youth, it was a buffer against an unnaturally frigid upbringing. Soon afterward, it became a distraction from great loss: Both his parents had died, one by suicide, by the time he was eighteen. Later, when he was a young architect, it helped leaven his days in an uninspiring job. Ignoring his wife and children and, eventually, his profession, he worked feverishly on the script at every available moment. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, his obsession had cost him his relations with his family, his architectural career, and, in the view of some observers, his life.

THE ONLY CHILD of Edward Francis Vereker Ventris and the former Anna Dorothea Janasz, Michael George Francis Ventris was born in Wheathampstead, a village about twenty miles north of London, on July 12, 1922. (At the time, Kober was in high school and Evans ensconced in his third decade of excavating and restoring the palace at Knossos.) On his father's side, Ventris was descended from an old English family inclined to produce straight-backed military men. His paternal grandfather was a highly regarded army officer who retired in 1920 as commander of the British forces in China. Michael's father, Edward, was an officer in India, though he appears to have had a less lustrous career than his father before him. “Overshadowed by illness and perhaps his own father's military reputation,” Andrew Robinson writes in
The Man Who Deciphered Linear B
, “he retired from the Army in his late thirties, as a lieutenant colonel, and was a semi-invalid for most of his remaining years.”

Ventris's mother's background was, by all appearances, something of a counterweight. Dorothea, or Dora, as she was known, was the beautiful dark-haired daughter of an English mother and a wealthy Polish landowner who had settled in England. She was passionately interested in the arts, the flourishing Modernist school in particular, and numbered among her friends many of the leading lights of Europe's contemporary art scene. Among them were the designer Marcel Breuer, the architect Walter Gropius, the painter Ben Nicholson, and the sculptors Henry Moore and Naum Gabo.

Edward Ventris suffered from tuberculosis, and Michael spent most of his childhood in Switzerland, where his father had gone for treatment. He attended a boarding school in Gstaad, where he readily acquired French, German, and the local Swiss German dialect. (He had long since acquired Polish from his mother.) Very early on, he became fascinated with the means of writing languages down. At eight, in Switzerland, he bought and devoured
Die Hieroglyphen
, a German-language book on hieroglyphics by the renowned Egyptologist Adolf Erman.

In accounts of Ventris's life, much has been made of his prodigious ability to pick up languages when he was just a boy. In fact, there is nothing remarkable about it: Acquiring languages in childhood is what each of us is biologically predisposed to do. What is genuinely noteworthy is that Ventris continued to do so, with equal facility, to the end of his life.

Children come into the world hardwired to acquire language, provided only that they are exposed to it. From birth through the age of about ten, a child can acquire a first language, as well as a second, third, fourth, and more, by drawing automatically on these inborn principles. Scientists call these years the “critical period” for language acquisition. But then, for neurological reasons that are not well understood, most people automatically exit the critical period near the start of adolescence. After that, new languages are accessible to them only through the arduous classroom instruction with which high school and college students are all too familiar.

But for a charmed few—for neurological reasons that are even less well understood—the critical period seems to continue undiminished through adulthood. They can inhale foreign languages at twenty or thirty as readily as they did at six, with minimal effort. Michael Ventris was beyond doubt such a person, possessing a rare, innate gift that would serve him singularly well in the years that followed.

“How do you come to be so expert in Swedish?” his collaborator John Chadwick wrote him in the 1950s, after Ventris sent him his own translations of accounts of the decipherment in the Swedish press. (The answer was simple: Ventris had mastered the language as an adult, in a matter of weeks, in preparation for a short-term architectural project in Sweden.)