The Riddle of the Labyrinth (41 page)

Turning again to the Cypriot syllabary, Ventris tried assigning the sound-value “ti” to the Linear B sign
, analogous to Cypriot
. As it happened, he had already placed
exactly where it ought to be: at the intersection of C6 (“t”) and V1 (“i”). Now the grid's web of interdependencies truly began to pay dividends: His correct placement
of automatically gave Ventris the value for
(“ni”) in the same column. The word
so far was pronounced like this:

a-
        
- ni-
        
.

To Ventris, the word looked more and more like “aminiso,” a syllabic spelling of “Amnisos.” It was one of the place-names that had seemed to suggest itself when he first tried the experiment in February. If that were the case, then the word's second character,
, was “mi.” (Ventris's initial placement of that sign as “fi” on the grid was incorrect.) Likewise,
was “so.”

Reading as
as “a-mi-ni-so” immediately gave Ventris two more characters to plug into the grid. Those in turn gave him values for all the consonants in Row 7 (“s”) and Row 9 (“m”), and for all the vowels in Column 2 (“o”):

He now turned to
, another “place-name” he had toyed with in February. From his revised grid, he knew that the third syllable was “so”:

        
-
        
- so.

He had already placed the symbol
at Row C8, Column V2, which gave it the value “no.” If this were correct, the word now looked like this: