The Riddle of the Labyrinth (51 page)

30
Schliemann, too, had his eye on Kephala
: Caroline Moorehead,
Lost and Found: The 9,000 Treasures of Troy—Heinrich Schliemann and the Gold That Got Away
(New York: Viking, 1994), 213ff.

      
“Nor can I pretend to be sorry”
: Sir Arthur Evans, introduction to Emil Ludwig,
Schliemann of Troy: The Story of a Goldseeker
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1931), 19, quoted in Horwitz (1981), 87.
“seemed to belong to an advanced system of writing”
: Evans (1909), 17.
“On the hill of Kephala”
: Ibid.
In 1894, after much negotiation
: Myres (1941), 947.
“native Mahometans”
: Evans (1899–1900), 5.
for 235 British pounds
: J. Evans (1943), 319.

31
“striking corroboration”
: Arthur J. Evans, “Further Discoveries of Cretan and Aegean Script: With Libyan and Proto-Egyptian Comparisons,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
17 (1897), 393.
“long before our first records”
: Evans (1897), 393.
the last of the Turkish forces left the island in late 1899
: J. Evans (1943), 326.
“after encountering every kind of obstacle”
: Evans (1909), 17.
for 675 pounds
: J. Evans (1943), 321.
he equipped himself with
: Ibid., 329; MacGillivray (2001), 166–67.
a fleet of iron wheelbarrows
: Evans (1899–1900), 68.
he set about disinfecting and whitewashing
: J. Evans (1943), 329.
with the Union Jack flying
: MacGillivray (2001), 175.
about 6100 B.C
.: Horwitz (1981), 96. The date was ascertained by later archaeologists, using carbon-14 dating.

32
It was rebuilt and partly reoccupied
: Evans (1909), 53.
a building larger than Buckingham Palace
: Horwitz (1981), 232.
spread over six acres
: Sir Arthur Evans,
The Palace of Minos: A Comparative Account of the Successive Stages of the Early Cretan Civilization as Illustrated by the Discoveries at Knossos
(London: Macmillan), vol. 1 (1921), v.

      
a small Egyptian statue, carved of diorite
: Evans (1899–1900), 27.
The palace comprised hundreds of rooms
: J. M. Christoforakis,
Knossos Visitor's Guide
, 3rd ed. (Heraklion: n.d.), 27.
the 1900 season, which lasted nine weeks
: Evans (1899–1900), 69.
30 workmen had grown to about 180
: Ibid.

33
Evans employed both Christian and Muslim workers
: Ibid.
In the course of the season, Evans's workers unearthed
: See, e.g., Myres (1901), 5; Evans (1899–1900), passim.
So delighted was Sir John
: J. Evans (1941), 333.
“almost thrown into the shade”
: Myres (1901), 6.
“a discovery which carries back”
: Ibid.
“a kind of baked clay bar”
: Quoted in J. Evans (1943), 330–31.
A similar account appears in Evans (1899–1900), 18.

34
“the dramatic fulfillment”
: Evans (1909), vi.
On April 5
: Evans (1899–1900), 18.
small bronze hinges
: Ibid., 29.
“just struck the largest deposit yet”
: Quoted in J. Evans (1943), 334.
between two and seven inches long
: Arthur J. Evans, “Writing in Prehistoric Greece,”
Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
30 (1900), 92.
sometimes fashioned around armatures of straw
: Chadwick (1976), 18.
One very large rectangular tablet
: Evans (1909), 48.

36
in use from about 2000 to 1650 B.C
.: John Chadwick,
The Decipherment of Linear B
, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 12.
Evans came across only a single cache
: Evans (1899–1900), 59.
“a new system of linear writing”
: Evans (1900), 91.
“style of writing fundamentally different”
: Ibid., 92.
used from about 1750 to 1450 B.C
.: Chadwick (1976), 13.

37
“Evidently the tablets were supplied”
: Sir Arthur Evans,
The Palace of Minos
, vol. 4 (1935), 695.

38
more than two thousand would be found there
: Chadwick (1976), 15.
“the work of practised scribes”
: AE letter to Sir John Evans, April 15, 1900. Quoted in J. Evans (1943), 333.
fingerprints and even occasional doodles
: Chadwick (1976), 20, 25.

39
“We have here locked up for us”
: Myres (1901), 6.
“The problems attaching to the decipherment”
: Ibid.

CHAPTER TWO: THE VANISHED KEY

42
By some estimates, only about 15 percent
: Harald Haarman,
Universalgeschichte der Schrift
(Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1990), 18ff.

44
“Decipherments are by far the most glamorous”
: Maurice Pope,
The Story of Archaeological Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Linear B
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975), 9.
Diagrammed, they make a tidy four-cell table
: The table is after E. J. W. Barber,
Archaeological Decipherment: A Handbook
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 13. This typology of decipherment was first put forth by Johannes Friedrich in, e.g.,
Extinct Languages
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), translated by Frank Gaynor.

45
a Polynesian language still spoken on the island
: www.ethnologue.com.

46
Weighing three-quarters of a ton
: Simon Singh,
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
(New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 205–6.

47
“the benefits that the Pharaoh Ptolemy had bestowed”
: Singh (2000), 207.

      
the demotic script had been introduced
: Andrew Robinson,
The Story of Writing
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1995), 16.

48
Born in 1773
: Singh (2000), 207.
“Young was able to read fluently”
: Ibid., 207–8.

49
“it would enable
[
him
]
to discover”
: Ibid., 209.
the arrangement of the symbols in a cartouche was rarely fixed
: Ibid., 210.

50
“Although he did not know it at the time”
: Ibid.
Here are the actual sound-values
: The chart is adapted from Ibid., 209.

51
“Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Ethiopic”
: Ibid., 213.
“that he used it to record entries in his journal”
: Ibid., 215.

52
then the cartouche so far would read
: After Ibid.
stood for the consonant cluster “ms”
: Robinson (1995), 33.

53
As Ventris's biographer Andrew Robinson points out
: Ibid., 101.

56
Rongorongo contains hundreds of logograms
: Andrew Robinson, personal communication.
Arthur Conan Doyle's “Dancing Men” cipher
: Robinson (2002) also invokes this cipher in a discussion of archaeological decipherment.

58
the Rotokas alphabet of the Solomon Islands
: Robinson (1995), 169; www.omniglot.com.
the thirty-three Cyrillic letters used in Russian
: Coulmas (1996), 109.
the more than seventy characters of the Khmer alphabet
: Robinson (1995), 169.
It will take our alien years of minute comparison
: The three capital
O
's are set, respectively, in the typefaces Edwardian Script, Matisse, and Jokerman. The next three letters are a capital
O
and
Q
, both in French Script, and a capital
C
in Edwardian Script. Andrew Robinson makes a similar point about the challenge of identifying variant letter-forms in
The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris
(London: Thames & Hudson, 2002b), 64–65.

59
“The individual signs of Linear B”
: Kahn (1967), 919. This passage is also quoted in Singh (1999), 220–21.
years agonizing over the symbol
: See, e.g., AEK to JFD, May 4, 1942, AEK Papers, PASP; Alice E. Kober, “The ‘Adze' Tablets from Knossos,”
American Journal of Archaeology
48:1 (1944), 65, note 2.

60
There were perhaps seventy scribes at Knossos
: Chadwick (1976), 24.
it was not completed until 1951
: Emmett L. Bennett Jr.,
The Pylos Tablets: A Preliminary Transcription
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951).

61
The Germans call this style
Schlangenschrift: Thomas G. Palaima, personal communication.

62
“The Adventure of the Dancing Men”
: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), with a preface by Christopher Morley, vol. 2, 511–26.

64
small vertical tick marks
: This inscription is also reproduced in Robinson (1995), 111.
“documents of ‘lime-bark'”
: Evans (1935), 673; see also Evans (1909), 108ff.

65
“The brown, half-burnt tablets”
: Evans (1935), 673.
Nero was reported to have ordered the documents translated
: Evans (1909), 109.

CHAPTER THREE: LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

67
the precious unbaked records reduced to mud
: See, e.g., Evans (1909), 43.
“In this way fire”
: Evans (1899–1900), 56.

68
In both scripts, text was written from left to right
: Evans (1935), 684.

69
“The conclusion has been drawn”
: Ibid., 711.
filed neatly away by subject
: Ibid., 694.
what appeared to Evans to be census data
: Ibid., 694, 708.

70
Evans was able to work out the numerical system
: Ibid., 691ff.

71
These often appeared next to numbers
: Evans (1921), 46–47.
the “Armoury Deposit”
: Evans (1935), 832.
more than eight thousand arrows inside
: Evans (1909), 44.
depicting the trellises on which grapes were grown
: Chadwick (1976), 124.

72
male and female animals
: Evans (1935), 723, 801.
the elegant answer to this little puzzle
: Chadwick (1967), 45.
logograms denoting vessels
: Evans (1935), 727.
a tablet inscribed with pictures of humble pots like these
: Chadwick (1967), 81ff.
David Kahn described so evocatively
: Kahn (1967), 919.

73
By Evans's initial count
: Evans (1903), 53.
“The number of signs between word boundaries”
: Barber (1974), 94–95.
modern Japanese writing
: Coulmas (1996), 239ff.
Evans himself suspected as much
: In a monograph on the early Cretan scripts (1903, 53), he wrote, “The characters seem to have had a syllabic value.”

74
“No effort will be spared”
: Evans (1899–1900), 59, note 2.
only about two dozen pages
: Evans (1909), 28–54.
a feat he wisely deemed impossible
: Ibid., v.
Although Evans promised additional volumes
: Ibid., x.
the Knossos tablets remained locked away
: Horowitz (1981), 159.

75
Not only did he decline
: Evans did, apparently, share particular tablets with certain trusted individual scholars. See, e.g., A. E. Cowley, “A Note on Minoan Writing,” in S. Casson, ed.,
Essays in Aegean Archaeology: Presented to Sir Arthur Evans in Honour of His 75th Birthday
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 5–7.

      
he would publish reproductions of fewer than two hundred
: Chadwick (1967), 18.
an act that brought down the wrath of Evans
: Ibid.; Evans (1935), 681, note 1.
He remained keeper of the Ashmolean till 1908
: Harden (1983), 14.
serving more or less simultaneously as president
: Ibid., 20.
the local Boy Scout troop
: Horwitz (1981), 167–68.
he took in two wards
: Ibid.
digging on Crete became impossible for the duration
: Ibid., 182.

76
taking an active hand in the negotiations
: Ibid., 192ff.
some two dozen bedrooms
: MacGillivray (2001), 137, gives the number of bedrooms at twenty-two; Horwitz (1981), 130, puts it at twenty-eight.
a sunken Roman bath
: Horwitz (1981), 130.
a mosaic floor set in a labyrinth pattern
: Ibid., 129.
two huge replicas, carved in mahogany
: Ibid.
“Evans' friends variously described Youlbury”
: Ibid.

77
Completed in 1906
: Harden (1983), 19.
The villa's cellar was stocked
: Horwitz (1981), 175.
the financier J. P. Morgan and the novelist Edith Wharton
: Ibid., 204.
“On the hottest days of a Cretan summer”
: Ibid., 5.
“Minos,” as Evans suspected
: Evans (1909), iv–v, note 1.
Queen's Megaron
: MacGillivray (2001), 216ff.
Domestic Quarter
: Horwitz (1981), 140.
a visiting Isadora Duncan danced
: James S. Candy,
A Tapestry of Life: An Autobiography
(Braunton, UK: Merlin Books, 1984), 26. Candy was the tenant farmer's son whom Evans took in as a ward. For the date, see Cathy Gere,
Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 94.

78
Evans spent decades clearing rubble
: See, e.g., MacGillivray (2001), 232ff.
newer materials like reinforced concrete
: Gere (2009), 1.
long before early Hellenic peoples
: Chadwick (1976), 4ff.
this one came from Evans himself
: Evans (1909), 1ff.
superior to them in every conceivable way
: Robinson (2002), 10, 33.
In his earliest writings on the Cretan scripts
: See, e.g., Evans (1894), passim.

79
Evans became convinced that the civilization he had unearthed
: Horwitz (1981), 2.
“As excavation went on”
: Myres (1941), 949.
He called his island culture Minoan
: Evans (1921), v.
a 2002 BBC television documentary
: This is
A Very English Genius
, first broadcast on the BBC in 2002.