Known Unknowns
Margalit Fox’s ‘Riddle of the Labyrinth’
Initial Excerpt: A WOMAN FINALLY GETS HER DUE
As was customary for archaeologists, he (Arthur Evans) reserved for himself the right to decipher the relics he’d found, making only a handful of the tablets public. Initially he made swift progress, puzzling out the ancient Cretan numerical system, determining that the hash marks appearing at periodic intervals divided the strings of characters into words the way spaces divide ours. He figured out that certain characters were logograms — pictures that stand for words. A tiny likeness of a horse’s head was the logogram for “horse”; a tiny symbol that to my eyes resembles a television antenna was the logogram for “tree.” Soon, however, his progress stalled. Decades passed, and still Evans refused to share his data set.
Why, exactly, his progress stalled requires more than a rudimentary understanding of the science of archaeological decipherment, and here Fox successfully executes the balancing act of translating and distilling a specialized field of knowledge for a general audience without oversimplifying or succumbing to the didacticism of a textbook. Even as we learn the difference between logographic and alphabetic writing systems, and the difference between a writing system and a language, and what “determinative” and “syllabary” mean, and how exactly Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta stone and how Sherlock Holmes solved the mystery in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” Fox draws us ever deeper into the labyrinth. As in a mystery novel, she is leaving the reader a trail of carefully placed clues, but she is also preparing for the grand entrance of her detective. . . . Alice Kober
By DONOVAN HOHN
Published: June 14, 2013
On March 30, 1900, during the excavation of the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete, site of the legendary labyrinth from which Daedalus and Icarus took flight, workmen unearthed a clay tablet inscribed with an unknown script. Some of the characters of the script looked like the letters of an alien alphabet, others like alien hieroglyphics. In the following weeks and months workmen unearthed more tablets, several hundred of which had fallen from a floor above into a terra cotta bathtub.
THE RIDDLE OF THE LABYRINTH
The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
By Margalit Fox
Illustrated. 363 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.
The tablets contained messages sent from the dawn of history, from before the time of Homer, but they were messages that could not be received. No one knew what language people spoke 30 centuries ago on Crete, and there was no Rosetta stone among the discoveries at Knossos. (There were, however, other enchanting wonders — elaborate lavatories, murals of griffins and dolphins.) For 50 years, the inscriptions seemed impossible to crack. The code’s ultimate decipherment would turn out to be one of the great scientific detective stories of the 20th century — The Mysterious Case of Linear B.
In Margalit Fox’s new history of the case, “The Riddle of the Labyrinth,” Sherlock Holmes makes several cameo appearances, and for good reason. In Fox, the story has found a worthy Conan Doyle. In the best detective stories, the mysteries of human character are as compelling as the enigmatic clues, and as central to the plot, which explains why Fox structures her book as a triptych of biographies.
In the first panel of the triptych, we meet Arthur Evans, the gentleman archaeologist who led the excavation at Knossos and who named the script Linear B — Linear because the characters had been scored with a stylus in linear strokes (imagine writing graffiti in wet concrete with a stick), B because among the tablets were samples of the script’s more primitive antecedent, Linear A. The third and final panel Fox devotes to Michael Ventris, the British architect who in 1952 dramatically announced on BBC radio that he, an ardent amateur with no formal training in linguistics or cryptography, had at long last solved the mystery. But it’s the figure in the middle panel, an unknown chain-smoking classicist from Brooklyn named Alice Kober, who is the hero of the story as Fox tells it, and it’s Fox’s portrait of Kober that is her book’s greatest contribution.
Fox writes obituaries for The New York Times, and she has a skilled obituarist’s eye for the telling detail. For his expedition to Crete, Arthur Evans brought two dozen tins of ox tongue, 12 plum puddings and a Union Jack. Even on a dig, he dressed in suit and tie and carried a walking stick he’d nicknamed Prodger. He possessed, Fox writes, “all of his era’s thirst for scientific inquiry, most of its grand passions and many of its reflexive prejudices.” He also possessed “the characteristics necessary for a world-class archaeologist: tirelessness, fearlessness, boundless curiosity, wealth, and” — Fox dryly adds — “myopia.”
Evans’s myopia wasn’t merely of the ocular sort. As was customary for archaeologists, he reserved for himself the right to decipher the relics he’d found, making only a handful of the tablets public. Initially he made swift progress, puzzling out the ancient Cretan numerical system, determining that the hash marks appearing at periodic intervals divided the strings of characters into words the way spaces divide ours. He figured out that certain characters were logograms — pictures that stand for words. A tiny likeness of a horse’s head was the logogram for “horse”; a tiny symbol that to my eyes resembles a television antenna was the logogram for “tree.” Soon, however, his progress stalled. Decades passed, and still Evans refused to share his data set.
Why, exactly, his progress stalled requires more than a rudimentary understanding of the science of archaeological decipherment, and here Fox successfully executes the balancing act of translating and distilling a specialized field of knowledge for a general audience without oversimplifying or succumbing to the didacticism of a textbook. Even as we learn the difference between logographic and alphabetic writing systems, and the difference between a writing system and a language, and what “determinative” and “syllabary” mean, and how exactly Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta stone and how Sherlock Holmes solved the mystery in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” Fox draws us ever deeper into the labyrinth. As in a mystery novel, she is leaving the reader a trail of carefully placed clues, but she is also preparing for the grand entrance of her detective.
For Fox doesn’t merely recount the history of Linear B, which has been told before (in previous tellings, it’s Ventris who has elicited the comparisons to Holmes). She’s out to correct the historical record, by rescuing Kober from obscurity and giving her discoveries their due. In this respect, Kober calls to mind other women in science — Rosalind Franklin, whose work produced the key Watson and Crick needed to unlock DNA, or Marie Tharp, the oceanographic cartographer, who (because midcentury research vessels were considered unsuitable for women) ended up on shore, making a map of the ocean floor and in the process discovering the rift valley in the mid-Atlantic ridge, a discovery that helped confirm the then controversial theory of plate tectonics.
Born in 1906, the daughter of working-class Hungarian immigrants, Kober nonetheless managed to earn a Ph.D. in classics from Columbia. She was short and wore thick glasses. A former student remembered her as “dumpy,” but also as an enthralling lecturer. In her intellectual life, she could be dauntless. Of a linguist who she felt had been treated “with kid gloves,” Kober remarked, “I suppose it’s because nobody thinks a man with Hrozny’s reputation could possibly be as stupid as he seems.” But she was just as merciless, if not more, toward herself. Her approach to the riddle of Linear B was monomaniacally methodological.
In a 1948 paper published in The American Journal of Archaeology, she summarized the riddle pithily: “An unknown language, written in an unknown script cannot be deciphered. . . . It is our task to find out what the language was, or what the phonetic values of the signs were, and so remove one of the unknowns.”
Here’s how you go about removing an unknown if you are Alice Kober: When not teaching introductory Latin to undergraduates at Brooklyn College, study a logographic foreign language (like Chinese), a syllabic one (Akkadian) and an alphabetic one (Persian). Spend several years searching Classical Greek for loan words (“linguistic ghosts,” Fox calls them) that for arcane reasons obvious only to linguists clearly predate Classical Greek. Compile, with fastidious accuracy, a master list of these words, among them, all words containing the suffix “-inth” (look again at Fox’s title). Do whatever it takes to get your hands on copies of the tablets in Evans’s collection. Fill 40 notebooks with words. During the paper shortages of World War II, when paper becomes unavailable, start cutting out index cards from “church circulars, the backs of greeting cards, examination-book covers, checkout slips from the college library” — accumulating 180,000 cards. (These index cards will bear an uncanny resemblance, in the end, to the tablets you are attempting to decipher.) Catalog the frequency with which any given character appears. Also catalog the position of characters in words. Note “repeated instances of two- and three-character clusters.” Turn the many empty cigarette boxes you have lying about the house you share with your widowed mother into miniature file cabinets in which you file your index cards. (From these file cabinets, Fox notes, there still wafts the scent of tobacco, and on them appear such unintentionally eloquent phrases as HERBERT TAREYTON: THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT THEM YOU’LL LIKE.) Compile all (or almost all) of the necessary clues, do the painstaking groundwork, find the key that will unlock the code and then, heartbreakingly, prematurely and swiftly, from causes possibly smoking-related, at age 43, in 1950, on the brink of plausible triumph — well, I don’t want to spoil it for you.
The weaknesses of Fox’s book emerge in her portrait of Michael Ventris, which leans heavily on previous studies of Linear B; she quotes more than once from a 2002 BBC biopic, “A Very English Genius,” based on a biography by Andrew Robinson, “The Man Who Deciphered Linear B.” “Granted, I have a brief for Kober,” Fox concedes, “just as Robinson did for Ventris.” She also concedes that had Kober lived, she might not have made the insightful leap Ventris made in figuring out how to use the key that Kober had found.
The messages sent 30 centuries ago by Cretan scribes did not turn out to contain proto-Homeric poetry, as more fanciful antiquarians had hoped. The tablets were the accounting books of the Palace of Knossos. They nevertheless contain archaeological significance and accidental eloquence, which Fox unfolds beautifully in her closing chapter. What stays with you aren’t the wonders of ancient Crete, however, but the genuinely heroic character and tragically abbreviated life of an unsung classicist who spent all but the last year of her career as a lowly assistant professor in Brooklyn.
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