The Riddle of the Labyrinth (6 page)

The scribes of Knossos were superb bureaucrats. Tablets were arranged by subject in their boxes, the file cabinets of the Bronze Age Aegean. Once filled and closed, each box was secured with a clay sealing indicating its contents. The sealing was impressed with a seal-stone like the ones Evans had encountered on his first trip to Crete. (Long before the Knossos tablets could be read, their subject matter—grain, livestock, chariots, weapons, and the like—could often be gleaned from the pictograms on the seals.)

Evans would identify three different scripts at Knossos. The first was a hieroglyphic script, the same kind he had seen on the seal-stones and engraved gems. From the depth of the soil in which traces of the script were found, he determined that it was in use from about 2000 to 1650 B.C. But while this script was found often on the clay sealings used to secure boxes of tablets, it was rare on the tablets themselves: In the whole of the palace, Evans came across only a single cache of tablets bearing hieroglyphic inscriptions.

Other tablets featured what he described as “a new system of linear writing,” which had evolved from the hieroglyphic script in the eighteenth century B.C. This linear script was a “style of writing fundamentally different from that of the hieroglyphic class, and far ahead of it in development. . . . The letters themselves . . . are of a free, upright European character.”

By 1902, Evans had further distinguished two types of linear script. The first, Linear Script Class A, was used from about 1750 to 1450 B.C. The second, Linear Script Class B, developed out of Linear A toward the end of this period. It was in use until the final destruction of the palace in the early fourteenth century B.C. Evans called the scripts “linear” not because their characters were arrayed in lines, although they were, but because those characters were made by means of linear strokes—a method quite different from the cuneiform writing of ancient Mesopotamia, in which signs were impressed in clay with a wedge-shaped tool. (With its unadorned outline forms, the Phoenician alphabet, which gave rise to nearly all the alphabets of the modern world, was also a linear script. So are its descendants, including our own familiar Roman alphabet.)

The great majority of the Knossos tablets were written in Linear B, including the first ones unearthed in the spring of 1900 and the large ones containing many lines of text. Linear B looked similar to Linear A but was by no means identical. The two scripts had many characters in common—among them
and
—but each also used characters not found in the other. The B script looked neater and more stylized than the A. Most Linear A texts were incised directly onto unruled clay, giving the writing a somewhat scattershot appearance. In contrast, Linear B tablets were nearly always ruled: The text sat on tidy horizontal lines that had been cut into the wet clay before the writing began. “Evidently the tablets were supplied in this state to the clerk, like ruled sheets of paper in a modern business office,” Evans wrote.

Of the three Cretan scripts Evans discovered—hieroglyphic, Linear A, and Linear B—Linear B stood the best chance of being deciphered. As with any secret code, the more text a decipherer has to work with, the greater the likelihood of solution. The number of Linear B tablets unearthed at Knossos far outstripped any other kind; over time, more than two thousand would be found there. From the beginning, it was Linear Script Class B, used in the twilight days of the Palace of Minos, that held the greatest promise.

The Linear B tablets have a stark beauty. Some have smooth, charcoal-gray surfaces resembling slate, others are reddish brown, still others are bright orange. (The color depends on the level of oxygen to which they were exposed when the palace burned down.) The incised characters are generally crisp and made with care. They are, as Evans put it, “the work of practised scribes.” On the backs of tablets, those scribes left traces of themselves in the form of fingerprints and even doodles. To look at the tablets even now is to be in the presence of other people—living, thinking, literate people.

This feeling animates all archaeological decipherment. The pull of an undeciphered ancient script comes not only from the fact that its discoverer cannot read it, but also from the knowledge that once, long ago,
someone could
. To Evans, the scribes of Knossos were real people who had set down the workings of their Bronze Age world, precisely and deliberately, on pieces of wet clay. Men could read those tablets once. It should be possible, even after thirty centuries, for man to read them again.

“We have here locked up for us materials which may some day enlarge the bounds of history,” Evans's assistant John L. Myres wrote in 1901. “The problems attaching to the decipherment of these clay records are of enthralling interest.”

And so they would be, for fifty years to come.

A
BOUT FIVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO, man stopped having to remember quite so much. Spoken language had already been in existence for at least fifty thousand years, evolving hot on the heels, evolutionarily speaking, of the dawn of man. But it wasn't until long afterward that man realized he could set down his language in graphic form, using visual symbols to encode speech and store it for later retrieval. For the first time, people did not have to depend on memory alone to transmit the history, lore, and daily activities of their communities. We call these marvelous storage-and-retrieval systems writing.

One of the foremost inventions in the history of mankind, writing probably developed independently in several places at around the same time. Before that time, people relied on a range of crude systems, like knotted strings, clay tokens, or notches cut in sticks, to help them count, tally, and remember. Scholars call these proto-writing. But writing proper—a full symbolic system that can record any imaginable text in a community's language—began only with the advent of Sumerian cuneiform in about 3300 B.C. In a separate though possibly related development, the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt arose around the same time.

Writing systems seem to have been rare in the ancient world, and even today, they are something of a linguistic luxury: By some estimates, only about 15 percent of the roughly six thousand languages spoken around the globe have written forms. It is entirely possible to have language without writing. Not so the other way round.

A writing system is simply a map. It works by taking the sounds of a language and mapping them, singly or in combination, onto designated graphic symbols. There are three types of mapping possible—three ways, that is, in which the sounds of language can be made to meet the eye. Every writing system in the world is one of these three types, or some combination of them.

The first type, in which a written symbol stands for a whole word (or a whole concept), is called logographic (or ideographic) writing. Chinese writing, with its tens of thousands of characters, each signifying a different word of the language, is the best-known example of a logographic script.

In the second type, a symbol stands for a single syllable, like
ma
or
pa, bo
or
do, tam
or
kam
. Examples of syllabic scripts, or syllabaries, as they are also called, include the Japanese kana script. (Japanese writing as a whole is a mixed script; besides syllabic characters, it includes a great many logograms, which like the kana are borrowed from Chinese script.)

In the third type of writing system, symbols stand for individual sounds. This is an alphabet. We owe the alphabet to the Phoenicians, a Semitic people, who fashioned a letter-by-letter writing system from an earlier Semitic script in about 1000 B.C. As the Phoenicians conceived it, the alphabet had twenty-two characters—consonants only, no vowels. This alphabet was later taken up by the Greeks, who added vowel signs; from the Greeks it passed to the Etruscans and on to the Romans, who gave us the familiar alphabet used to write many Western languages, including English. The Phoenician script and its immediate descendants are the progenitors of nearly all the alphabets used round the world today, from Roman to Cyrillic to Hebrew and Arabic and, quite probably, many of the graceful curvilinear scripts of India.