The Riddle of the Labyrinth (49 page)

BOOK: The Riddle of the Labyrinth
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BUT FOR ALL THIS, the communal welfare of the Mycenaean state did not last forever. On Crete, catastrophe claimed the Palace of Knossos sometime between 1450 and 1400 B.C. On the mainland, Pylos, at least, held on until about 1200, when it, too, was destroyed. “What actually happened remains a tantalizing mystery,” John Chadwick has written. “All we know is that the palace was looted and burnt. The absence of human remains suggests that no resistance took place there;. . .the archaeological picture suggests that the population was reduced to something like a tenth of its earlier numbers.”

So ended the first flush of Greek civilization, and from then till the coming of the Greek alphabet centuries later, the art of writing was at best a dimly remembered dream. Before long the Mycenaean archives—describing a world of monarchs and slaves, gods and goddesses, spinners and weavers, men who made art and men who made war—had passed from readability into darkness, where they would languish for three thousand years.

That we have been able to admit this world to the annals of history owes to a long confluence of natural forces and forceful natures. Had the ancient palaces not burned to the ground; had Schliemann not dug at Mycenae; had Arthur Evans not been so very determined (and so very nearsighted); had Alice Kober not painstakingly scissored 180,000 index cards from odd scraps of paper; had Michael Ventris not been such a woeful boy, in deep need of intellectual distraction, we would know nothing of the written records of these early Greeks—the Bronze Age heroes of whom Homer would sing—unearthed, unlocked, and readable once more.

APPENDIX: THE SIGNS OF LINEAR B

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BOOK: The Riddle of the Labyrinth
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