The Riddle of the Labyrinth (12 page)

When he was finished with the numbers, Evans turned to the words. The tablets contained many obvious logograms—pictographic signs standing for whole words. These often appeared next to numbers to show the thing counted. One cache of tablets, which came to be known as the “Armoury Deposit,” contained inventories of military equipment such as wheels, chariot frames, and javelins. Elsewhere in the palace, Evans came upon a tablet inscribed with the “arrow” sign,
, which tallied large quantities of arrows. Nearby were the remains of a chest with more than eight thousand arrows inside.

There were dozens of logograms in Linear B. To modern eyes, some look highly cryptic, among them
and
. The meaning of many of these is still debated today.

Others were far more transparent. Some, though conceived in the Bronze Age, are enduringly recognizable, like
and
, the Linear B signs for “man” and “woman,” which would be at home today on any restroom door in the world. Others, including these, were also easily understood:

Evans also identified pairs of related logograms that appeared to stand for male and female animals. One sign in each pair was written with two crosshatches on its stem, while the other had a V-shaped stem. There were signs for stallions and mares
; boars and sows
; bulls and cows
; rams and ewes
; and billy goats and nanny goats
. Evans could only guess which sign indicated the male of the species and which the female; the elegant answer to this little puzzle, which came from Alice Kober, would not be known until decades later.

Linear B was also awash in logograms denoting vessels of all kinds:

More than five decades after Evans first dug at Knossos, a tablet inscribed with pictures of humble pots like these would unlock the mystery of Linear B once and for all.

BESIDES LOGOGRAMS, LINEAR B contained dozens of nonpictographic signs. These appeared most often in small strings, called “sign-groups,” with the little word-dividers separating each group. These included the ones David Kahn described so evocatively in
The Codebreakers
: the “Gothic arch enclosing a vertical line”
, the “heart with a stem running through it”
, the “three-legged dinosaur looking behind him”
, the “backward S”
and the “tall beer glass . . . with a bow tied on its rim”
.