The Riddle of the Labyrinth Read online

  Though Evans couldn’t read the tablets, he immediately surmised what they were: administrative records, carefully set down by royal scribes, documenting the day-to-day workings of the Knossos palace and its holdings. If the tablets could be decoded, they would open a wide portal onto the daily life of a refined, wealthy, and literate society that had thrived in Greek lands a full millennium before the glory of Classical Athens. Once their written records could be read, the Knossos palace and its people, languishing for thirty centuries in the dusk of prehistory, would suddenly be illuminated—with a single stroke, an entire civilization would become history.

  But which civilization was it? As Evans well knew, many ethnic groups had passed through the Bronze Age Aegean, and there was no way to tell whose language, and whose culture, Linear B represented. To him, though, this seemed a small impediment. Evans was already something of an authority on ancient scripts, and with characteristic assurance, he assumed he would one day decipher this one. By 1901, only a year after the first tablet was unearthed, he had commissioned Oxford University Press to cast a special font, in two different sizes, with which to typeset the Cretan characters.

  But Evans underestimated the formidable challenge Linear B would pose. An unknown script used to write an unknown language is a locked-room mystery: Somehow, the decipherer must finesse his way into a tightly closed system that offers few external clues. If he is very lucky, he will have the help of a bilingual inscription like the Rosetta stone, which furnished the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Without such an inscription, his task is all but impossible.

  As Evans could scarcely have imagined in 1900, Linear B would become one of the most tantalizing riddles of the first half of the twentieth century, a secret code that defied solution for more than fifty years. As the journalist David Kahn has written in The Codebreakers, his monumental study of secret writing, “Of all the decipherments of history, the most elegant, the most coolly rational, the most satisfying, and withal the most surprising” was that of Linear B.

  The quest to decipher the tablets—or even to identify the language in which they were written—would become the consuming passion of investigators around the globe. Working largely independently in Britain, the United States, and on the European continent, each spent years trying to tease the ancient script apart. The best of them brought to the problem the same meticulous forensic approach that helps cryptanalysts crack the thorniest codes and ciphers.

  No prize was offered for deciphering Linear B, nor were the investigators seeking one. For some, like Evans, the chance to read words set down by European men three thousand years distant was compensation enough. For others, the sweet, defiant pleasure of solving a cryptogram many experts deemed unsolvable would be its own best reward.

  Today, in an era of popular nonfiction that professes to find secret messages lurking in the Hebrew Bible, and of novels whose valiant heroes follow clues encoded in great works of European art, it is bracing to recall the story of Linear B—a real-life quest to solve a prehistoric mystery, starring flesh-and-blood detectives with nothing more than wit, passion, and determination at their disposal.

  Over time, two besides Evans emerged as best equipped to crack the code. One, Michael Ventris, was a young English architect with a mournful past, whose fascination with ancient scripts had begun as a boyhood hobby. The other, Alice Kober, was a fiery American classicist—the lone woman among the serious investigators—whose immense contribution to the decipherment has been all but lost to history. What all three shared was a ferocious intelligence, a nearly photographic memory for the strange Cretan symbols, and a single-mindedness of purpose that could barely be distinguished from obsession. Of the three, the two most gifted would die young, one under swift, strange circumstances that may have been a consequence of the decipherment itself.

  Considered one of the most prodigious intellectual feats of modern times, the unraveling of Linear B has been likened to Crick and Watson’s mapping of the structure of DNA for the magnitude of its achievement. The decipherment was done entirely by hand, without the aid of computers or a single bilingual inscription. It was accomplished, crumb by crumb, in the only way possible: by finding, interpreting, and meticulously following a series of tiny clues hidden within the script itself. And in the end, the answer to the riddle defied everyone’s expectations, including the decipherer’s own.

  To Ventris, the solution brought worldwide acclaim. But before long it also brought doubt, despair, personal and professional ruin, and, some observers believe, untimely death.

  All this was decades in the future that March day at Knossos, when the first brittle tablets emerged from the ground. But of one thing Arthur Evans was already certain. Guided by the smallest of clues, he had come to Crete in search of writing from a time before Europe was thought to have writing. And there, he now knew beyond doubt, he had found it.

  BOOK ONE

  The Digger

  Arthur Evans at Knossos, 1901

  Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

  1

  THE RECORD-KEEPERS

  EVANS CAME TO CRETE TO fill a void. In 1876, Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman with a burning interest in the classics, began excavating a site on the Greek mainland, about seventy miles southwest of Athens. The site he chose was fabled as the home of Mycenae, the ancient city known from Homer as the kingdom of Agamemnon, brother-in-law of the beautiful Helen of Troy.

  As Evans would on Crete a quarter century later, Schliemann unearthed the relics of an advanced Bronze Age civilization, this one lying two hundred miles north of Crete, over the sea. Mycenae had been a real, prosperous, well-run society that flourished in the second millennium B.C. Before long, the most visible Bronze Age ruins there could be dated to about 1600 to 1200 B.C.: In the late 1880s and afterward, the distinguished archaeologist Flinders Petrie uncovered Mycenaean trade goods, including ceramic vessels, while excavating Egyptian sites of known date.

  Schliemann was already famous for unearthing vanished worlds. In the early 1870s, he had uncovered what he believed to be Troy itself, at Hisarlik, in present-day Turkey. There, where King Priam was fabled to have reigned, and where a long, bloody war was said to have raged after Priam’s son, Paris, abducted Helen from her home in Sparta, Schliemann dug fruitlessly for several years. Shortly before the dig was to end, he later wrote, he came upon a golden hoard: gold diadems and goblets and buttons and earrings and rings. It would be known ever after as the treasure of Priam.

  Schliemann’s excavation methods, which involved the wholesale hacking away of huge, potentially fruitful layers of soil, distress many modern archaeologists. Over the years, the authenticity of some of his finds, both at Troy and Mycenae, has been questioned. Today, some critics view him more as tomb robber than archaeologist.

  What Schliemann’s archaeology lacked in scientific rigor it amply made up in romantic fervor. Driving him to dig at both sites was the desire to prove that Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were factual works of history. (The poems are now thought to have been composed in the eighth or seventh century B.C. Schliemann’s earnest belief that they were nonfiction is one that few scholars, now as then, have been inclined to share.)

  But Schliemann’s work remains important for having taken civilizations thought to be the figments of tale-tellers and placed them, at least possibly, within the realm of history. At Hisarlik, he helped animate the heroes of the Trojan War, fought, some sources say, in the thirteenth or twelfth century B.C. At Mycenae, too, he brought the world of the Aegean Bronze Age to light, showing that a high civilization was already in full flower on the Greek mainland a thousand years before Classical times. Ever since Schliemann dug at Mycenae, the span of early Greek history from the sixteenth to the thirteenth centuries B.C.—the era when this mainland kingdom was at its height—has been known as the Mycenaean Age.

  Mycenae had been a walled citadel. It was made of stone blocks so massive, the scholar J
ohn Chadwick wrote, that “the later Greeks understandably concluded that the walls had been built by giants.” Still standing in Schliemann’s day was the city’s famed Lion Gate, a portal of enormous blocks topped with two lions in carved relief. It was a splendid feat of engineering, yet so different stylistically from the triangular pediments and fluted columns of Classical Greece. Digging down into the circle of deep “shaft graves” inside the city’s walls, Schliemann brought up priceless golden artifacts, engraved gems, silver vessels, and other treasures.

  But just as striking was what Schliemann didn’t find. Despite the great refinement of the Mycenaean kingdom, despite the well-oiled administration that had clearly sustained it, there was no sign of writing anywhere. Though Schliemann excavated on a typically grand scale, pouring his vast personal resources into the dig, he turned up no clay tablets, no inscriptions cut in stone—no evidence whatsoever that this sophisticated mainland society had been literate.

  This bothered Evans. Like many people, Arthur Evans had followed the newspaper accounts of Schliemann’s dig with rapt interest. Surely, Evans thought, so advanced a civilization, with all its attendant bureaucracy, would have had a means of keeping written records. Mycenaean society was far too complex—too competent—he believed, not to have been acquainted with writing in some form. As Evans would later explain, his Victorian worldview on unabashed display, “It seemed incredible that [such] a civilisation . . . could in the department of writing, have been below the stage attained by Red Indians.”

  Perhaps the Mycenaeans had written on perishable materials, like palm leaves, bark, or hide. But by the Victorian era, beguiling hints that they had written on sturdier stuff had begun to surface. In the early 1890s, Chrēstos Tsountas, an associate of Schliemann working at Mycenae, unearthed a clay amphora—a type of two-handled vessel—with three “linear” signs incised on one handle. Nearby, in a Mycenaean tomb, Tsountas unearthed a stone vase whose handle was engraved with four or five linear symbols. Elsewhere on the mainland, linear signs were found painted on a few pieces of pottery.

  The three linear signs incised on the handle of a mainland vessel. The leftmost symbol was also seen at Knossos.

  Arthur J. Evans, Scripta Minoa

  There were also hints on Crete. In the late 1870s, the remains of a Bronze Age wall were exposed at Knossos, on the site at which Evans eventually dug. In the early 1880s, one of the wall’s huge gypsum blocks was discovered to be inscribed with a series of linear symbols, which scholars quickly dismissed as “masons’ marks.” Strikingly, the wall at Knossos and the amphora at Mycenae, separated by two hundred miles of sea, had a symbol in common, the character . The more Evans considered the question, the more he became convinced that some form of writing had existed in the Aegean in Mycenaean days.

  Evans was only in his twenties when Schliemann dug at Mycenae, but he already possessed the characteristics necessary for a world-class archaeologist: tirelessness, fearlessness, boundless curiosity, wealth, and myopia. By the 1890s, when he began to attack the problem in earnest, he had already traveled to remote corners of the globe; become a recognized expert on ancient coins; lived for long periods in the Balkans, where he was a passionate advocate of the Slavic nationalist cause; and been appointed keeper, as the head curator was known, of the Ashmolean, the distinguished archaeological museum in Oxford. Armed with these unassailable assets, Evans went forth to find evidence of writing in Mycenaean times. Clue after clue would point him toward Crete.

  Excavation was in Evans’s blood. His father, Sir John Evans, a wealthy paper manufacturer, was also a distinguished amateur geologist, archaeologist, and numismatist. Known among his contemporaries as Evans the Great, John Evans “helped to lay the foundations of modern geology, paleontology, anthropology, and archaeology despite the fact that he could dedicate only Sundays and holidays to the dim past,” Sylvia L. Horwitz wrote in The Find of a Lifetime, her biography of Arthur Evans.

  The eldest of five children of John and Harriet Dickinson Evans, Arthur John Evans was born on July 8, 1851. He was reared with his siblings in the Hertfordshire countryside in a grand house overflowing with fossils, prehistoric stone tools, arrowheads, Roman coins, and ancient pottery, the stuff of their father’s weekend trade. Arthur was a sober, curious boy who could spend hours intently studying old coins, though he seemed indifferent to conventional book-learning. (Because Arthur had not mastered Latin grammar by the age of six, as his father before him had done, his paternal grandmother confided to Harriet her fear that the child was “a bit of a dunce.”)

  On New Year’s Day 1858, when Arthur was six and a half, Harriet Evans died after giving birth to her fifth child. Afterward, as Arthur’s much younger half sister, Dame Joan Evans, recounted in her biography of him, Time and Chance, “John Evans wrote in his wife’s diary that [the children] did not seem to feel her loss; more than seventy years later Arthur Evans was to write an indignant NO in the margin.” The next year, John Evans married a cousin, Fanny Phelps, who was by all accounts a loving stepmother to Harriet’s children.

  As a schoolboy at Harrow, Arthur won prizes in natural history, modern languages, and the writing of Greek epigrams. Entering Oxford, he studied history, graduating with first-class honors in 1874. As a twenty-year-old undergraduate, he published his first scholarly article, “On a Hoard of Coins Found at Oxford, with Some Remarks on the Coinage of the First Three Edwards.” It was his first public foray into the antiquarian circles of which his father was a leading light. (As a result of his early work, Arthur became known in those circles as “Little Evans, son of John Evans the Great,” a description that must surely have rankled.) After graduating from Oxford, Arthur studied briefly in Germany before striking out on the first of several long trips to the Balkans. The region interested him intensely, and he would live and work there for much of the next decade.

  At the time, the Balkans were under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and the Slavic peoples of the region were eager to throw off its yoke. Evans became a staunch public champion of the Slavs’ struggle for self-determination—a struggle that was often violent during the years he was there. In impassioned, unapologetically partisan prose, he filed a series of dispatches to the Manchester Guardian chronicling the heroism of the Slav resistance fighters. From his eventual base in Ragusa—the old Italian name for Dubrovnik, in what is now Croatia—Evans ranged over the remote corners of Serbia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina by foot, horseback, and steamer. He traversed the wild countryside to investigate reports of Turkish atrocities in remote villages, stripped off his clothes to ford icy rivers, and scaled cliffs to meet with fierce Turkish overlords in their mountaintop command posts. He was often uncomfortable, usually inconvenienced, and occasionally imprisoned. None of this seemed to bother him very much.

  In 1876, when he was twenty-five, Evans published the first of his two books on the Balkans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot, whose grandiloquent full title, Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875: With an Historical Review of Bosnia, and a Glimpse at the Croats, Slavonians, and the Ancient Republic of Ragusa, left little doubt as to the sweep of his enterprise. The exploits he recounted gave one normally unflappable reader cause for concern. “Mind where you travel!” the intrepid British explorer Richard Burton wrote Evans in 1877, after reading his work.

  In September 1878, Evans married Margaret Freeman. Small, plain, intelligent, and three years older than he, she was a daughter of Edward Augustus Freeman, a well-known historian now best remembered for his fiercely held views on Aryan racial supremacy. After their marriage, Evans brought Margaret to live in his beloved Ragusa, where they occupied a pleasant house by the sea in the old walled city. Evans had horrified his father by signing a twenty-year lease on the place.

  He would not get to stay nearly so long. In 1882, with the region now controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Evans was arrested for his political activities. Released by Austrian officials a
fter seven weeks in a local jail, he was expelled from Ragusa. With Margaret, he returned to England. In 1884, Evans was appointed keeper of the Ashmolean, and the couple settled in Oxford.

  By this time, Arthur Evans embodied the Victorian age writ large, or, more precisely, writ small. A diminutive man of barely five feet, Evans possessed all of his era’s thirst for scientific inquiry, most of its grand passions, and many of its reflexive prejudices. Deeply curious about far-off lands and their people, he nonetheless bristled when Bosnian villagers addressed him as brat, “brother.” An ardent defender of the downtrodden, he could also write, as he did in Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot: “I don’t choose to be told by every barbarian I meet that he is a man and a brother. I believe in the existence of inferior races, and would like to see them exterminated.” (Evans tempered his verdict slightly in the next sentence, writing, “But . . . it is easy to see how valuable such a spirit of democracy may be amongst a people whose self-respect has been degraded by centuries of oppression.”)

  Despite his small stature, Evans cut an imposing figure, always impeccably turned out in suit, tie, vest, and hat, and carrying a sturdy walking stick he had nicknamed Prodger. Prodger was not so much to lean on as to see by: From earliest childhood, Evans had been desperately nearsighted. As Joan Evans wrote: “His short sight, for which he refused to wear proper glasses, made him carry his head in a rather peering way. Moreover, he suffered from an extreme degree of night blindness, so that in the winter terms at Harrow he needed a friendly guide to steer him to or from afternoon school.”

  But Evans’s myopia, so constraining in other ways, proved a staggering advantage in his line of work. Unlike most people, he could see things with near-microscopic precision at extremely close range. When he was a boy, his stepmother, Fanny, wrote fondly of his peering at the face of an old coin “like a jackdaw down a marrow bone.”