The Riddle of the Labyrinth (7 page)

Whichever type it is, every writing system operates on the same basic principle, using individual symbols to represent one or more sounds of a language. In logographic systems, a character stands for the whole string of sounds known as a word. A syllabic system bites off smaller chunks, using a character to stand for perhaps two or three sounds. In an alphabetic system, the segment is smaller still, usually just a single sound, as with our
l
or
m
or
t
or
v
. In this way, every writing system functions as a kind of elementary encoding device, mediating between spoken sound and graphic symbol. But in order for the code to work properly, it must be transparent to all who would use it.

To know the relationship between the sounds of a language and the written symbols that represent them—to hold the key to the code—is to be able to read that language. As long as there is someone alive who retains the key, the language can be read. But with the passage of time, the key can be lost. Now the link between sound and symbol is broken, and the text becomes as impenetrable as any secret code. That is where decipherment comes in.

In his book
The Story of Archaeological Decipherment
, the scholar Maurice Pope elegantly describes the lure of ancient script:

When a reader confronts a text, the crucial question is this: What is known about the language of the text and what, correspondingly, is known about the script used to write it? For any written text, this relationship between language and script can take just one of four forms. Diagrammed, they make a tidy four-cell table:

The upper-left-hand cell, which is blank, represents the most straightforward case. Here, a known language is written with a known script, as in the passage you are now reading, written in English by means of the Roman alphabet. No decipherment is required.

The other three cases entail decipherments of varying difficulty. In Case I, in the upper-right-hand corner, an unknown script is used to write a known language. That is the case for Rongorongo, an undeciphered script of Easter Island discovered in the 1860s. Dating to the eighteenth century A.D. or earlier, the script was apparently used to write Rapa Nui, a Polynesian language still spoken on the island. But because Rongorongo fell into disuse (and because it lacks many of the internal clues, like word breaks, that help analysts tease a script apart), it is now impossible to tell which symbols in the script correspond to which sounds of the language.

In Case II, on the lower left of the table, a known script is used to write an unknown language. That happened with Etruscan, an ancient non-Indo-European language of Italy that remains poorly understood to this day. The script used to
write
Etruscan is known: It derived from the Greek alphabet. As a result, it is still possible to read an Etruscan text aloud, giving each letter its familiar Greek sound-value. But to even the most knowledgeable linguist, the result sounds like gibberish. No one knows what most Etruscan words mean, or how Etruscan grammar worked. Read aloud, an Etruscan text is awash in sound but signifies practically nothing.

Case III, on the lower right, is the toughest of all. Here, both language and script are unknown. This is the most inhospitable environment for decipherment possible, for it gives the decipherer no outside aid: no familiar script to help sound out the language, no familiar language to help sort the script. Such was the case for Linear B when Evans unearthed it in 1900. The script was a linguistic terra incognita with neither map nor compass at hand.

IN EVANS'S DAY, the most famous archaeological decipherment in history was that of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Unlike Linear B, the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt did not have to be dug up and discovered: They were always there, and they always beguiled. Their decipherment, accomplished in the 1820s, would exert a considerable and ultimately harmful influence on Evans's approach to Linear B.

Developed in about 3000 B.C., Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was in use for more than three millennia. After that, with the spread of Christianity, the Egyptian language was written increasingly with the Coptic alphabet, a twenty-four-character script derived from the Greek alphabet. By about 400 A.D., the hieroglyphs had been abandoned entirely. Carved in stone, they would tantalize scholars for centuries to come.

By the modern era, no one was even certain what language the ancient Egyptians had spoken. Whatever it was—possibly an ancestor of Coptic, an Afro-Asiatic language later used in the region—it had long since been supplanted by Arabic. Faced with the decipherer's worst-case scenario, an unknown script writing an unknown language, generations of scholars could do little more than speculate on what the hieroglyphs said.

In 1799, a key appeared at last with the discovery of the Rosetta stone. The Napoleonic Wars were raging, and one of Napoleon's campaigns had brought a troop of French soldiers to the Egyptian town of Rashid, known in the West as Rosetta. The soldiers were charged with dismantling an ancient wall there. As they did, they came upon a large black slab set into the wall. Weighing three-quarters of a ton, it was removed to Cairo for study and eventually made its way to the British Museum, where it resides today.

There were three scripts on the stone. On the bottom was a passage in Greek, which could be read with ease. It was a decree from 196 B.C. describing, as the journalist Simon Singh wrote in
The Code Book
, “the benefits that the Pharaoh Ptolemy had bestowed upon the people of Egypt, and . . . the honors that the [Egyptian] priests had, in return, piled upon the pharaoh.”

The other two scripts wrote the ancient Egyptian language. On top was a passage in the familiar ornate hieroglyphs. In the middle was a passage in the style of Egyptian writing known as demotic. Cursive, streamlined, and faster to write than hieroglyphics, the demotic script had been introduced in the seventh century B.C. Where the Egyptians had used hieroglyphs for religious, dedicatory, and other official inscriptions, they used demotic for everyday writing.

Two languages, three scripts. In the Rosetta stone, prospective decipherers had found their hoped-for bilingual inscription—known in archaeologists' parlance simply as “a bilingual.” Since the stone was obviously meant as an official record, it was reasonable to assume that all three passages said the same thing.

Thanks to the Greek passage, the general meaning of the hieroglyphic text was known. But the precise way in which the hieroglyphics encoded the Egyptian language—what type of writing system they were and what the sound-value of each character was—remained a mystery. Because of the highly pictorial nature of the glyphs, most scholars assumed they were part of a logographic system, with each little picture representing a separate Egyptian word.

A partial answer came in 1814 from Thomas Young, an English physician and polymath. Born in 1773, Young was known for conducting important research on color perception and the physiology of the human eye and, in particular, for his work in physics. He was also deeply interested in languages. “Young was able to read fluently at the age of two,” Singh wrote. “By the age of fourteen he had studied Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Ethiopic, and when he became a student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, his brilliance gained him the sobriquet ‘Phenomenon Young.'”

Poring over copies of the Rosetta inscriptions, Young began to suspect that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were not a pure logographic system after all, but rather a mixed script, comprising both pictograms and phonetic characters. He concluded this after he matched some Greek proper names on the stone to whole strings of hieroglyphics rather than to single signs.

Proper names are a decipherer's best friend. They normally pass from one language to another almost unchanged, and it is often possible to pick them out precisely, even in an unfamiliar script. (They would ultimately play a significant role in the decipherment of Linear B.) Seeing a proper name on the known side of a bilingual immediately gives the decipherer something to look for on the unknown side. Suppose, for instance, you unearth this tiny tablet:

Inscribed in English and Classical Greek, the tablet contains two proper names. Even if you have never encountered Greek—and even though the words appear in a different order than in the English passage—you can make a pretty fair guess as to which these are.

Young seized on the fact that in Egyptian writing, groups of hieroglyphics were sometimes ringed by little enclosures, known as cartouches. There were a number of cartouches on the Rosetta stone. In 1762, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, a French priest who was a scholar of Eastern languages, had made the inspired guess that the cartouches set off words of great importance, such as the names of gods or rulers. One of the names in the stone's Greek text was
Ptolemaios
, the pharaoh Ptolemy. If Young were able to locate the name Ptolemy in the Egyptian text, Singh wrote, “it would enable [him] to discover the phonetics of the corresponding hieroglyphs, because a pharaoh's name would be pronounced roughly the same regardless of the language.”

Confounding the problem was the fact that the arrangement of symbols in a cartouche was rarely fixed. Though the overall direction of Egyptian script was right to left, within a cartouche, scribes tended to group characters in whatever configuration was most aesthetically pleasing. Despite these difficulties, one cartouche seemed especially promising. With certain variations, the scribes had repeated it on the stone a half-dozen times. In its simplest form, it looked like this:

Could this cartouche spell the name Ptolemy? By trial and error, Young began assigning phonetic values—that is,
sound-values
—to the seven different glyphs inside it. “Although he did not know it at the time,” Singh wrote, “Young managed to correlate most of the hieroglyphs with their correct sound values.” As Young suspected, the characters in the cartouche weren't logograms at all. Instead, they worked phonetically, with each character representing a single sound of Egyptian. Here are the actual sound-values of the glyphs in the Ptolemy cartouche, most correctly determined by Young: