Before Greek was Greek

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, decipherment, linear b, greek language, minoan script, biographies

The decipherment of Linear B was the greatest triumph of applied linguistics in history. The story of Jean-François Champollion and Egyptian Hieroglyphics is better known, but Champollion had the Rosetta Stone to provide what is effectively a trilingual dictionary. The persons who "cracked" Linear B had to manufacture their own "Rosetta stone" almost out of thin air.

Gentleman archaeologist Arthur Evans and his crew began to unearth clay tablets at Knossos, Crete in 1900. He soon determined that a small number of them were older than the rest, and seemed to be linguistically ancestral. Both scripts were drawn in clay with a pointed stylus, scribing glyphs formed of straight and curved lines, and thus they were dubbed Linear A and Linear B. This tablet of Linear B writing is better preserved than most. It is housed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. 

The tablets themselves were preserved because Knossos was invaded, destroyed and burned. The tablets, destined to be dissolved and the clay re-used after a year or so, were baked, effectively fired into hard ceramic.

Evans found about 200 tablets with Linear A inscriptions. To date, just over 1,400 Linear A inscriptions are known, but with ten or fewer glyphs on most of them, the total corpus is too small to succumb to statistical analysis. By contrast, by 1952 when the decipherment of Linear B was mostly complete, 2,000 tablets were known, and at present, more than 6,000 inscribed artifacts have been found, many of them substantially longer than the typical Linear A inscription.

The story of that decipherment and the back story of the excavation of Knossos in the early 1900's are presented in The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox. To us, an unknown script is a kind of code. To the Minoans of 1400 BC, however, it was their language, just as this page is written in English, my language. Maybe in 3,000 years or so English will be as little known as is the language represented by Linear B or, even more so, Linear A.

Long ago I learned that Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris, a British architect and amateur linguist. His story is told, with only a little hype, in the documentary film A Very English Genius. However, his work relied on the statistical analyses of a very American genius, Alice Kober. This book brings her out of the shadows to which a century of male bias had consigned her. The work of both of them was, not so much depending upon, but impeded by, the attempts at decipherment by the discoverer of the tablets, Arthur Evans.

Sir Arthur Evans (knighted subsequent to his discoveries) was an excellent archaeologist, but as a scholar he was a real jerk, and kept 90% of the tablets away from others during his long lifetime. When he finally died at age 90 in 1941, the work which Ms Kober had been doing with the limited body of text available to her got a real boost. 

Not that there was an immediate breakthrough: just copying the texts in pre-computer times required hand transcription (even a photo is hard to interpret, as this example shows). Ignore the blue tinting; it is an artifact of boosting the contrast of the photo.

It had been evident to Evans that most of the tablets recorded economic transactions. This one is evidently a descriptive list of items, noting whether there one or two of each. The circle with dots inside is a logogram for some commercial object, I don't know what.

Knowing the general subject of the texts helped. Statistical work, which took years and years, gradually ferreted out the information needed for Alice Kober to discern a few crucial facts (Note: "language" is spoken; "script" is written; a "glyph" is a written symbol):

1. The language was inflected. Inflections are used in most Indo-European languages. English has only a few inflections, such as "-s" to indicate plural nouns (dog → dogs) and third-person verbs (I swim → she swims), and "-d" or "-ed" for the past tense of many verbs (work → worked), for example. Other languages have many more kinds of inflections, while Chinese, for example, has hardly any.
2. The script is logo-syllabic, meaning that most of the meaning is carried by glyphs that represent syllables, but a few glyphs represent whole words (our "&" for "and" is an example). Chinese is logographic: tens of thousands of core words are represented by a single glyph each, while other words are composed from two or three glyphs. English and most European languages are alphabetic, with a very small (26 for English) number of glyphs that each represent a single "atom" of sound. Amharic (Ethiopian) script is a syllabary with 231 glyphs, which are comprised of seven variations of 33 basic forms. The most familiar logo-syllabic scripts are Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Japanese. Japanese script uses a few thousand logograms derived from Chinese, and 72 syllabic glyphs used for inflection, foreign words, and words not expressed by the Chinese glyphs. Linear B has about 90 syllable-glyphs and perhaps 100 logographs.
3. Inflection and syllabaries don't work too well together. For instance, for "worker" and "working" it isn't hard to extract the inflections "-er" and "-ing". But suppose one has what is called a CV syllabary (such as Linear B), where CV means Consonant-Vowel. The symbol for "ke" and the one for "ki" will be different, perhaps quite different (dealing with the terminal "r" and "ng" sounds is another issue…). Alice Kober determined many of the "bridging" glyphs needed for Linear B to work with an inflected language.
4. A grid of syllabic relationships, a kind of matrix. A significant number of the glyphs could be arranged thus, making it possible to take a stab at certain meanings, without knowing how any of them were pronounced.

All this had been worked out and published by the time Alice Kober died in 1950 at age 43, probably of cancer. Her filing and sorting system depended on cards she sorted into cigarette carton boxes! She had been greatly helped during her last few years of life by the release of 80-90% of the tablets for her to view and transcribe, after the death of Arthur Evans. Now the torch had to pass to another, and that was Michael Ventris.

Michael Ventris had a few stellar qualities that made him well suited for decipherment. All three, Evans, Kober and Ventris, had a facility for learning languages. Ventris, in particular, never lost a child's ability to learn a language very quickly.

A side note on that: Many years ago my wife, a Japanese, was hired by a school district on a military base to teach one class daily in Japanese to the children of soldiers who had children born in Japan, who had not learned English yet. Classes were also held in German and Spanish for kids born into those languages. By three months into the program, it wasn't needed; the children learned English from their classmates so fast they achieved near-native fluency by Christmastime. Thus, the three teachers in the program were re-directed to teach a language class in Japanese, German or Spanish to any child in the school who wanted it, or whose parents wanted it for them.

Having already studied Linear B for half his life (he was not quite 30), Ventris now set aside his architecture career to dive into decipherment full time. From the beginning he had felt certain that the language behind Linear B was Etruscan. In about a year, greatly aided by Kober's results, particularly the grid/matrix, and having made the inspired assumption that words unique to tablets found at Knossos and words unique to tablets found in Greece were place names, gained the ability to assign sound values to a few signs. The grid then "solved itself", much like solving a Sudoku puzzle. He was forced by the decipherment itself to realize that the language was Greek, not Etruscan. He had the intellectual honesty to accept this. He announced the decipherment in 1952.

Fame swallowed up much of his time. Accolades devoured him. He was sometimes dogged with a case of imposter syndrome, embarrassed by the success. Plus, once one has climbed the highest mountain, what's next? He was still puzzling over that when he died in a car crash at the age of 34.

The Linear B inscriptions do not record sagas, hero stories, or kingly decrees. They are mostly lists and receipts of a commercial nature. In an era before money was common, a barter economy, keeping track of "stuff" was a critical requirement for a civilization to function. We may think we have a lot of paperwork now, but imagine if we had to record all transactions "in kind"?! "This chariot is worth so many sheep," and "That chair is worth about as much as a side table." How does one even figure his own net worth (the opening chapter of the Biblical book of Job gives us a hint)? The very banality of the inscriptions is their value. They record people's daily lives. We learn many day-to-day things about life in Knossos and nearby places.

Ms Fox's writing carried me right along. Riddle is a detective story, with three generations of detective, who solved a riddle that Sherlock Holmes would find baffling. In "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" Holmes solved a cipher. Those of us who like puzzles enjoy the newspaper cipher puzzles, which are about on the same level of difficulty. Solving Linear B was a half-century effort, though I think it is fair to argue that the solution process made little headway until 1941, after Arthur Evans died. Alice Kober laid the groundwork for solution in eight or nine years, working with 10% of the material. Then, once "the rubber hit the road" the American genius and the English genius solved Linear B in about twelve years.