The Riddle of the Labyrinth (44 page)

What Ventris disclosed in the broadcast was breathtaking: Well before the Greek language was thought to exist, the first Greek-speaking people, unruly and unlettered, swarmed into Crete. There, they appropriated one of the indigenous writing systems—Linear A—that had flourished on the island for generations. The Knossos tablets and their later counterparts at Pylos were written, against all expectations, in a very early version of the language of Plato and Socrates, set down centuries before the advent of the Greek alphabet. Chronologically, the Greek dialect they contained was as distant from Classical Greek as the Anglo-Saxon of
Beowulf
is from Shakespeare.

Ventris's announcement brought him a measure of renown in Britain. It also brought him critics—the dubious, the envious, the bewildered, and the vitriolic—who simply could not credit that a mere amateur had solved one of the greatest riddles in Western letters. Even Bennett and Myres remained unpersuaded at first. But the deepest doubts came from Ventris himself. In his seminal Work Note 20, which he had described as “a frivolous digression,” he had taken pains to call attention to features of the script that appeared incompatible with Greek. In the weeks after the decipherment, as his private correspondence makes plain, he continued to fear that his own solution was the product of smoke and mirrors.

Ventris gained a valuable ally in John Chadwick, a classics professor at Cambridge University. Chadwick was interested in the Aegean scripts but was not part of the circle of scholars actively working on them; neither Kober nor Ventris had been in correspondence with him. But he was a specialist in early Greek dialects, and a former wartime cryptographer. Ventris's broadcast left him intrigued if skeptical. He got in touch with Myres, who handed him Ventris's Work Notes. As Chadwick later described the visit:

Chadwick began plugging Ventris's sound-values into the published inscriptions, and before long he was a convert. He also discovered additional Greek words on the tablets that had escaped Ventris's notice. “I think we must accept the fact,” he told Myres, “that a new chapter in Greek history . . . is about to be written.”

In mid-July, Chadwick wrote to Ventris directly. “Dear Dr. Ventris,” he began, a salutation that suggests he believed Ventris to be an academic. “Let me first offer my congratulations on having solved the Minoan problem; it is a magnificent achievement and you are yet only at the beginning of your triumph. . . . Ever since hearing your talk on the wireless I have been most excited, and when Sir John showed me your provisional list of identifications last Monday I set to work at once to verify your discovery.”

In closing, Chadwick made a gracious offer: “If there is anything a mere philologist can do,” he wrote, “please let me know.” Whether he realized it or not, he had just thrown Ventris a lifeline, and Ventris grasped it gratefully: Chadwick had a deep knowledge of pre-Classical Greek, as well as the academic bona fides Ventris lacked.

“Frankly at the moment I feel rather in need of moral support,” Ventris replied. “The whole issue is getting to the stage where a lot of people will be looking at it very skeptically, and I am conscious there's a lot which so far can't be very satisfactorily explained. . . . I've been feeling the need of a ‘mere philologist' to keep me on the right lines. . . . It would be extremely useful to me if I could count on your help.”

Chadwick was able to allay some of his fears right away. One involved the word “the,” or rather the lack of it, on the tablets. The Classical Greek texts Ventris had studied as a schoolboy teemed with the definite article in its welter of forms: masculine, feminine, and neuter genders, singular and plural, in each of five grammatical cases. But he couldn't find “the” anywhere on the Linear B tablets, and that worried him. In fact, Chadwick assured him, that was precisely to be expected in Bronze Age Greek. Even five hundred years later, in the Greek of Homer's time, “the” was a rarity, taking firm root in the language only in the Classical Age.

In the summer of 1952, the two men embarked on a close collaboration that would last to the end of Ventris's life, with Chadwick, as Robinson observed, playing the dogged Watson to Ventris's inspired Holmes. An article they would write together, “Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives,” brought the decipherment to a wide scholarly audience. Another, published in the British journal
Antiquity
, brought it to a wide popular one. They also began work on a massive book,
Documents in Mycenaean Greek
, which would become the bible of Linear B studies, though Ventris would not live to see it in print.

Despite the sense of security the collaboration should have brought him, Ventris “had attacks of cold feet that summer,” as Chadwick recalled in
The Decipherment of Linear B
. His “Greek solution” continued to cause him anguish. “Every other day I get so doubtful about the whole thing that I'd almost rather it was someone else's,” Ventris wrote Chadwick at the end of July.

Ventris's doubts crept into the prestigious public lectures he was increasingly asked to give. Before one talk, at Oxford, Chadwick had to counsel him not to shy away from his own solution. “I feel it would be appropriate . . . to be a little more definite in asserting the language to be Greek,” Chadwick told him. “A proper intellectual humility is a good thing, but (especially at Oxford) it may be mistaken for diffidence.”

As Ventris was well aware, many still viewed the decipherment with suspicion. Evans's hold over Classical archaeology had been iron-fisted, and even a decade after his death, many scholars still believed that the language of Linear B could not possibly be Greek. Their criticism centered in part on the seeming malleability of Ventris's spelling rules, which permitted the deletion of consonants, the insertion of vowels, and other alterations at strategic points in Linear B words. The character
, for instance, as Ventris acknowledged, could stand not only for “po” (as in the word “po-lo”), but also for “pho,” “poi,” “phoi,” “pol,” “phol,” “pom,” “phom,” “pon,” “phon,” “por,” “phor,” “pos,” “phos,” and many other syllables. With desire, imagination, and mercurial spelling rules, the critics argued, a decipherer could mold the inscriptions to mimic practically any language. Hrozný had done precisely this when he “read” the Knossos texts as a form of Hittite. Ventris, his antagonists believed, had done likewise.

In the spring of 1953, vindication came from an improbable source: the American archaeologist Carl Blegen, previously so unforthcoming with the tablets he had unearthed at Pylos. Digging there again in 1952, Blegen found more tablets, and it was one of these that would help Ventris silence his critics. The tablet, known officially by the unromantic name P641, was a handsome thing. Long, slender, and nearly intact, it was inscribed with three lines of text. Like most Linear B tablets, it was an inventory, in this case of pots, jars, and other vessels:

After plugging some of Ventris's sound-values into the inscription, Blegen knew immediately that this tablet confirmed the decipherment. In May 1953, after the tablet had been cleaned, catalogued, and copied, he mailed a transcription to Ventris in a striking act of collegiality. P641 wasn't a bilingual, but it was the next best thing: a list containing names of objects accompanied by logograms for those objects. In a sense, it
was
a bilingual, inscribed in Greek and the universal language of pictures. It would prove to be the decipherment's crowning confirmation.

The tablet's opening phrase consisted of a four-word inscription, followed by a picture of a three-legged cauldron and the number 2. It looked like this:

When Ventris's sound-values were plugged in, the phrase read this way:

Blegen recognized the first word, “ti-ri-po-de,” as the Linear B spelling of the early Greek word meaning “two tripods”—the “dual” number of the Classical Greek word
tripos
, “three feet.” Translated, the phrase on the tablet described two “tripod cauldron(s) of Cretan workmanship,” and a three-footed cauldron was precisely what the pictogram showed. “Is coincidence excluded?” he wrote to Ventris in May.

The rest of the tablet was equally exciting. One phrase,
, could be transliterated
dipae mezoe tiriowee
, “larger-sized goblets with three handles.” A picture of a three-handled vessel appeared at the end of the phrase. Another,
,
dipa mezoe qetorowe
(“larger-sized goblet with four handles”), was followed by a picture of a four-handled vessel. The word
dipa
, “goblet” (
dipae
is the plural), recurs, only slightly altered, in Homer: In the
Iliad
, Nestor, King of Pylos, has a cup so large that when filled, it can scarcely be lifted. It is called a
depas
. Other phrases on P641 described other kinds of vessels (“smaller-sized goblet with three handles,” “smaller-sized goblet without a handle”), each accompanied by the corresponding logogram.