The Riddle of the Labyrinth (42 page)

        
- no - so.

The incomplete word suggested a Cretan place-name—and not just any place-name but the single most important one on the island: Knossos, spelled syllabically as “ko-no-so.” This let Ventris position
correctly on the grid, where “k” and “o” meet:

Without the grid, identifying a name here or there would have yielded little additional return. With it, each new value “forced out” others, in precisely the kind of chain reaction Kober had foreseen. As a result, the third name Ventris had examined in February,
, could be read as “tu-ri-so,” the Linear B spelling of Tulissos, also a Cretan town. As new sound-values burst from the grid, Ventris was able to read additional Cretan place-names in the Knossos inscriptions, including
= “pa-i-to” (Phaistos) and
= “ru-ki-to” (Luktos).

Once again, proper names had come to a decipherer's rescue. Ventris's great intuitive leap had proved correct: Kober's triplets represented the “alternative name-endings” of Cretan towns. That was his second significant contribution. Greek place-names alone, as Ventris knew, didn't prove that the language of the tablets was Greek. They could have been survivals carried over into Greek from an earlier, indigenous language—Ventris still held out for Etruscan. But in the coming weeks, as he worked the grid more deeply and new words emerged, he began to see something quite different from Etruscan. The process was like watching a photograph swim into being in a developers' tray, though what was coming to the surface didn't look much like Greek, either. Then again, of all the languages in the world that might be written with a syllabary, Greek is one of the worst candidates there is.

Greek screams for an alphabet. It is to the Greeks—who encountered the Phoenician alphabet at the start of the first millennium B.C., knew a good thing when they saw it, and improved upon it further—that we owe our own Roman alphabet, so handy for writing English. A “CV” syllabary like Linear B, on the other hand, which represents consonants and vowels in march-time alternation, is far less suited for writing Greek. Greek is a clatter of consonant clusters. (Consider, for example, the Classical Greek verb
epémfthēn
, “I was sent,” fairly choked with contiguous consonants.) The language is also rife with side-by-side vowels, as at the beginning—and end—of the noun
oikía
, “house.” For such words, too, Linear B is generally ill-equipped.

It had been understood since Evans's time that Linear B was an outgrowth of Linear A. Most investigators, including Evans and Ventris, thought the scripts wrote the same language. But what if they didn't? What if Linear B represented not the indigenous tongue of Minoan Crete but the language of later mainland colonizers? In that scenario, the invaders, unexposed to writing till they poured into Crete, seized the existing Minoan system for their own use. But if their native language was ill-suited to a syllabary, they would have needed to put the Cretan script through a set of compensating gyrations.

Though Ventris had held fast to his “Etruscan solution” since he was barely out of short pants, by the spring of 1952 he realized that he had to consider an alternative scenario: that the language of Linear B was not an indigenous Cretan tongue, but a Mycenaean import. That account would vindicate the few scholars, including Kober and Bennett, who thought the languages of Linear A and Linear B were different. It would also explain the presence of the B script on the mainland, brought back by victorious conquistadors for use at home.

Ventris began to wonder: Were the peculiar “spellings” of Linear B words the result of Cretan scribes having to force the square peg of the script into the round hole of a language for which it was never intended? Over the coming weeks, he worked out a set of “spelling rules” by which Linear B might have been used to write a non-Cretan tongue. The elucidation of these rules was his third major contribution. Among them were these:

One rule concerned the deletion of final consonants in Linear B words. Perhaps the most distinctive “fingerprint” of Classical Greek spelling is that words nearly always end in a vowel, or in one of a small set of consonants: “l,” “m,” “n,” “r,” or “s.” When a “CV” syllabary is used to write such a language, it immediately runs into trouble, because it can't spell words that end in consonants. The scribe then has two options: He can insert a “dummy” vowel at the end of the word. (In such a system, the English word
cat
might be spelled “ca-t
a
.”) Alternatively, he can delete final consonant altogether. (In this case,
cat
becomes “ca.”)

Linear B chose the second alternative, and the word
po-lo
, so tartly dismissed by Evans, is a perfect example of the rule in action. The word was indeed
pōlos
(“foal”), impeccably respelled in Linear B. The problematic final “s” was simply lopped off, as the script's syllabic spelling rules dictated.

Strikingly, the Cypriot syllabary, when conscripted to spell Greek, made the opposite—though equally valid—choice. Instead of deleting final consonants, it tacked a “dummy” vowel on to the ends of words as needed: In Cypriot spelling, the Greek word
doulos
(“slave”), for instance, would have been written
do-we-lo-se
, with the final “e” serving as the dummy vowel. (In Linear B, by contrast, the same word is spelled
do-e-ro
.)

This difference in the handling of final consonants was the primary reason the Cypriot clue had been deemed useless for Linear B. As expected, Cypriot inscriptions in Greek contained a bevy of words ending in “se,” written by means of the character
. (These were words, like
doulos
, that actually ended in “s” in Greek.) If Linear B also wrote Greek, scholars reasoned, the tablets should be filled with words that ended with the corresponding character,
. But as the statistics of Kober, Ventris, and other investigators revealed,
did not appear at the ends of Linear B words especially often. This reinforced the prevailing notion that the script wrote a non-Greek language.

Another “spelling rule” noted by Ventris concerned Linear B's use of dummy vowels to break up Greek consonant clusters. The rule is at work in the very first syllable of “Knossos.” Written in Linear B, the word is “k
o
-no-so,” with the “o” of the first syllable intervening between the “k” and the “n.” (Note, too, that the final “s” has been deleted, exactly as Linear B's spelling rules predict.)