The Riddle of the Labyrinth (46 page)

“It may be interesting to discuss just how one sets about a job like this,” Ventris explained on the radio that day. “It is often alleged to be impossible to decipher a set of inscriptions where both the writing and the language are unknown quantities, and where there is no bilingual to help us. But provided there is enough material to work on, the situation is not hopeless at all. It simply means that, instead of a mechanical piece of decoding, a rather more subtle process of deduction has to be undertaken. It is rather like doing a crossword puzzle on which the positions of the black squares have not been printed for you.”

But it had been Kober, after all, who supplied those first black squares—enough of them to let the puzzle be solved. It was she who, after poring for years over the snarl of symbols and cutting out tens of thousands of cards, identified the language of Linear B as inflected. That was the decipherment's essential first step. It was she who put her finger on the singular interaction between an inflected language and a syllabic script, pinpointing the critical “bridging” character. That was the second step. And, in the third step—her masterstroke—it was she who realized that it was possible to plot the relationships among characters in the abstract, drawing up the very grid on which Ventris later built.

It was also she who had determined at the start that the only hope of cracking the code lay in hunting down and analyzing internal patterns in the script, without speculating on either the underlying language or the sound-value of any character. And that was as essential to the decipherment as anything.

In a scholarly lecture he gave in 1954, published posthumously in 1958, Ventris did credit Kober at some length, speaking of her “series of fundamental articles” that constituted “the first systematic programme of analysis and research of the Linear B documents.” But it was too little, too late, and for too minute an audience.

The question beckons: Could Kober, given more time, have solved the riddle of the script? Andrew Robinson thinks not, writing that she “was probably too restrained a scholar to have ‘cracked' Linear B.” I am not so certain. Granted, I have a brief for Kober, just as Robinson did for Ventris. But let us, as she might have said, consider the facts, which her archived correspondence lets us do more fully than at any time in the past. Kober was cautious, yes, but her private papers reveal a genuine willingness to experiment—at her dining table, at least, if not yet in print. We know, for instance, that very early on, she allowed herself to play with the Cypriot syllabary, plugging its sound-values into the Knossos inscriptions. The fact that she “had no results” is hardly surprising, given the paucity of Linear B inscriptions then available and the corresponding poverty of knowledge about the script.

Her careful ten-cell grid of 1948, as Maurice Pope points out, made possible every stage of the decipherment that followed. “Every one of Kober's inferences . . . has been supported by Ventris' decipherment,” he wrote in
The Story of Archaeological Decipherment
. “Kober's method of trying first to establish the interrelationship of the phonetic values of particular signs on an abstract level was as unique as it was fruitful.”

She
was
wrong about one thing, though only partly. But it was this error that ultimately let Ventris slip past her to make the intuitive leap that allowed him to decipher the script.

Kober's mistake concerned inflection. She was right that the language of Linear B inflected its words for gender, as the two forms of the word “total,” and the words “boy” and “girl” showed. She was also right that it inflected its words for case—the who-does-what-to-whom of sentences. But she was wrong about precisely
which
words those actually were.

Her error centered on the sets of words that Ventris called “Kober's triplets.” They included this set, from her 1948 article:

As Kober realized, the “triplets”
did
represent a series of word endings—
and
—attached to the same stem. But the endings in question were not precisely the kind she had supposed, and that turned out to make all the difference.

Many languages, including Greek and English, use two different types of word endings, called “grammatical” and “derivational.” Grammatical endings, which include case inflections, give a sentence its syntax. Derivational endings, by contrast, create bigger words from littler ones. In English, grammatical endings are rare—limited to the lonely final
-s
on third-person-singular verbs; the past-tense suffix,
-ed
; and a half-dozen others. But derivational endings are legion. They include
-ity
, which turns an adjective into the corresponding noun (
scarce, scarcity)
;
-ing
, which turns verbs into participles (
swing
,
swinging)
;
-able
, which changes a verb into an adjective meaning “capable of being. . .” (
sing, singable)
; and many more.

Kober thought her triplets represented inflection. Ventris thought they represented derivation—“alternative name-endings,” he called them—and he was right. Which type of endings the triplets turned out to be made no difference to Kober's essential theory: Either way, the “bridging” characters function precisely as she described them. But recognizing the triplets as having
derivational
rather than
grammatical
endings is what let Ventris surpass the ground she had gained.

In his great intuitive leap, Ventris guessed that the “alternative name-endings” in the triplets were derivational variants of place-names—variants along the lines of
Brooklyn/Brooklynite/Brooklynese
. He found that one such word,
(the last word in the triplets above), could be transliterated as
ko-no-so
, the name for Knossos itself. The word just above it,
, clearly had the same stem. It turned out to be
ko-no-si-jo
, “men of Knossos.” The topmost word,
, was
ko-no-si-ja
, “women of Knossos.”

The other triplets, he found, behaved similarly:

Proper names like these turned out to be central to Ventris's decipherment, as they have been to many of the great decipherments in history. But in her private papers, there is evidence that as early as 1947, Kober was willing to consider the same idea. The evidence comes from an unlikely source: the bug man, William T. M. Forbes, professional entomologist and amateur etymologist. In a letter to Kober dated May 1, 1947, Forbes floated an idea he had proposed to her many times before: that on certain tablets, at least, some of the inflected words in her paradigms represented the names of Cretan towns. In the margin of his letter, in her unmistakable pedagogical hand, Kober penciled the annotation, “Agree—place-names.”

If her teaching load had not been so great, if her Guggenheim Fellowship had been renewed, if she had been hired at Penn after all, if Myres had not saddled her with a crushing secretarial load, if her champion John Franklin Daniel had lived—if
she
had lived—it is entirely possible that Alice Kober would have solved the riddle of Linear B. Among her papers in the archives of the University of Texas is an undated notebook in which she constructed a phonetic grid containing more than twenty Linear B characters—more than twice the number of her published grid. She never published this larger grid, nor did she assign sound-values to any character on it. But as Ventris's decipherment would show, her relative placement of every character was correct. She was clearly poised to make headway, if only she had been given time.