The Riddle of the Labyrinth (43 page)

Applying these rules and others, Ventris found he could read still more words. Among them were
and
, the words for “total.” His grid gave them the values “to-so” and “to-sa”—perfect Linear B spellings of the Classical Greek words
tossoi
and
tossai
, the masculine and feminine plural forms of the word meaning “so much.” The Linear B signs for “boy” (
) and “girl” (
) came out as “ko-wo” and “ko-wa,” which suggested
kouros
and
korē
, the masculine and feminine singular forms of the Greek word for “child.”

It was these words more than anything that forced Ventris to abandon his cherished “Etruscan solution” once and for all. “To-so” and “to-sa,” along with “ko-wo” and “ko-wa,” strongly suggested that the language of the tablets inflected its words for gender, much as French or Spanish does. Gender inflection is a hallmark of the Indo-European language family, to which languages like French, Spanish, German, Latin, and Greek belong. (What is more,
-o
and
-a
serve as masculine and feminine endings in a spate of Indo-European languages.) The presence of gender inflection in the tablets suggested a language other than Etruscan: Etruscan was non-Indo-European, and from everything scholars had gleaned about its grammar, it did not inflect words for gender.

In the coming weeks, Ventris pinpointed additional words, including
, “po-me” (like Classical Greek
poimēn
, “shepherd”);
, “ke-ra-me-u” (
kerameus
, “potter”; think of the English word
ceramics)
;
, “ka-ke-we” (
khalkēwes
, “bronze-smith”); and
, “te-ko-to-ne” (
tektones
, “carpenters”; compare English
tectonic
, which likewise has to do with the fitting together of things). Each new word meant new sound-values for the grid. These in turn generated other values.

On June 1, 1952, Ventris composed the twentieth and last in his series of Work Notes. This, his most famous Note, bears a title at once bold and tentative: “Are the Knossos and Pylos Tablets Written in Greek?” Just five pages long—far shorter than many previous Notes—Work Note 20 betrays the author's deep ambivalence about the solution that was massing unbidden before his eyes. “In the chains of deduction which spread out,” Ventris wrote, “we may, I believe, initially strike words and forms which force us to ask ourselves whether we are not, after all, dealing with a
Greek
dialect.”

Then, in the very next paragraph, he retreats, writing, “These may well turn out to be a hallucination.” He then continues: “If we were to toy with the idea of an early Greek dialect, we should have to assume that a Greek ruling class, appearances to the contrary, established itself at Knossos as early as 1450, and that the new Linear B was adapted from the indigenous syllabary in order to write Greek.”

Over the next several pages, Ventris lays out the results of his place-name experiments before closing with a final retreat: “If pursued, I suspect that this line of decipherment would sooner or later come to an impasse, or dissipate itself in absurdities; and that it would be necessary to revert to the hypothesis of an indigenous, non-Indo-European language.”

But over the next few days, try though he might to suppress it, Greek kept asserting itself. One night in early June, he found he could no longer fend it off. That night, the journalist Prue Smith and her husband had been invited to dine at the Ventrises' flat; Smith's husband, also an architect, was a colleague. When they arrived, as she recounts in her memoir, Michael Ventris was nowhere to be seen:

After spending half his life on the problem, Michael Ventris, a month shy of his thirtieth birthday, had solved the riddle of Linear B. But before long, just as the script itself had, the consequences of being its decipherer would start to consume him.

P
RUE SMITH WAS A RADIO producer at the BBC. She had also studied classics. As Ventris, in high excitement, explained his discovery that tipsy night in his flat, she knew she was witnessing something extraordinary: Her friend had just solved one of the most intractable problems in history.

On July 1, 1952, after reworking his script several times, Ventris took the microphone at BBC Radio. The broadcast, as Andrew Robinson notes, is the only record we have of his voice: high, light, cultured, melodious, with “a curious combination of firmness and diffidence, reflecting the brilliant but still unproven nature of his discovery.” The program was called “Deciphering Europe's Earliest Scripts,” and it would prove transformative—for Ventris, for scholarship, and for the collective understanding of European history. Ventris said:

With the almost simultaneous publication of the Knossos and Pylos tablets, all the existing Minoan Linear Script material is now available for study, and the race to decipher it has begun in earnest. . . .

For a long time I . . . thought that Etruscan might afford the clue we were looking for. But during the last few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that the Knossos and Pylos tablets must, after all, be written in Greek—a difficult and archaic Greek, seeing that it is 500 years older than Homer and written in a rather abbreviated form, but Greek nevertheless. . . .Once I made this assumption, most of the peculiarities of the language and spelling which had puzzled me seemed to find a logical explanation. . . .