by Alison Fell
‘Maybe so,’ he said, shrugging.
‘Keep still!’ Irini clamped an immobilising hand over his skull. The pressure was considerable, as if she wanted to thrust him down through the padded chair and the floor and into the very bowels of the earth. ‘Maybe nothing,’ she hissed, as the points of her scissors clipped a perilous crescent just above his ear.
19
By the 1920s Sir Arthur Evans had differentiated the Minoan scripts into Hieroglyphic, found on early sealstones and tokens, and Linear A, the syllabic script which he proposed as the predecessor – the Mother script, as it were – of Linear B.
Although Linear B was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1953, Linear A is still keeping its secrets. For 60 years epigraphers struggling with the earlier script have made no substantive progress. Even though Linear A and Linear B share many signs, and the syllabograms are thought to share some sound-values, the Linear A script appears to represent no known language of the region – rather in the way that English and French both use the Roman alphabet, but are completely different languages.
Even the scholars of Alice Kober’s day recognised that the objects on which Linear A featured were likely to have been devotional. Unlike the clay Linear B tablets, with their quotidian inventories of livestock, wool, and grain, it may be said that the Linear A inscriptions have always held out the promise of insights into religious and ecstatic practices.
The carved images on the early Minoan sealstones are tantalising, inscrutable. The Nature Goddess is yanked from the soil like a snake or a sheaf of barley; the Mistress of the Animals suckles goats and gazelles. There are male Adorants, certainly – up on tiptoe, their outstretched arms hoisted in a kind of heil, their bodies arched suggestively, pelvis forward, before the Goddess – but there are no masculine deities, not a single one in sight. No woman worth her salt, one might think, could fail to be intrigued.
It is tempting to wonder, therefore, why Kober had been so quick to dismiss Linear A as a suitable case for decipherment back in the 1940s. Although one cannot fault her rationale – there were too few Linear A finds, compared to the substantial Linear B hoard, a situation which still applies today – what is perhaps harder to understand is how she was able to resist its promise: the lure, one could say, of the labyrinth.
What one must remember is that the female scholars of Kober’s era faced enormous difficulty and prejudice; their fear of the ‘irrational’ – that accusatory shorthand for ‘feminine’ – must have been so much more acute than ours. Perhaps clever Alice, minding her ps and qs, simply opted to leave the wilder epiphanies to the men, who could better afford to make fools of themselves. It goes without saying that, in those days, ‘incisive’ was generally guaranteed to earn more plaudits than ‘insightful’ – although the goalposts, of course, could always be shifted. Michael Ventris, for instance, described Kober’s logic as ‘prim but necessary’, and even told an American woman colleague that her approach to decipherment was ‘a shade too frigid and destructive’ for his taste.
Any mention of Alice Kober, any recognition of her contribution, invariably came with a judgement: she had lacked the creative courage, the willingness to take intellectual risks, of the truly first-rate scholar. The balls, one might say. For Kober it was a no-win situation: since they could not fault her logic, they would damn it with faint praise. So if her decision to turn her back on Linear A was based on nothing other than common sense and cool ambition – and history, one may say, has proved that decision right – well then, all credit to her.
On her way to the bus stop Ingrid sees Zoe Shapcott approaching, in sports bra and skin shorts, jogging magnificently in the cool morning light.
‘You’re up early!’
Pushing back her earphones, Zoe stops, panting. Strands of hair which have escaped from her ponytail stick sweatily to her forehead.
‘Sometimes I can’t sleep after dawn. That studio’s so titchy.’ Zoe gives a pretty grimace. ‘And Dad snores, bless him!’
Ingrid hides her surprise. She’d assumed that the Shapcotts had a two-room apartment. They certainly look as if they could afford it. Picturing the two single beds, she wonders if such easy intimacy is to be envied. At Zoe’s age, the thought of sharing with her father would have been, quite literally, unthinkable. Perhaps it bodes well for Zoe’s sexual future. Then again, perhaps it doesn’t.
‘Off to town?’ Zoe is looking curiously at her briefcase.
‘The Museum calls, I’m afraid.’
‘Are you, like, writing a book or something?’
‘You could say.’ Ingrid shrugs. ‘It’s about dead philologists,’ she adds on a note of self-mockery, hoping to forestall the inevitable enquiries.
Zoe’s face lights up. At close quarters, her skin is faultless, smooth and creamy as a new egg. ‘Hey, that’s really cool!’
Ingrid has to laugh. It isn’t exactly the word she’d have chosen. In the face of Zoe’s bounteous youth, her prehistoric logograms – not to mention Miss Alice E. Kober, deceased – seem deader and dustier than ever.
The Archaeological Museum is sheathed in scaffolding; flaking stucco and rust-veined extractors give it the look of some NHS hospital thrown up in the ‘30s and going to pot. In the gravel courtyard a bed or two of sorry shrubs lie smothered under fallen plane tree leaves, and an armless kore of the classical period stands next to a white block of Portaloos. From the door marked with the universal Ladies logogram, a woman emerges, flapping water off her fingers and frowning in exasperation.
She presents her ticket and walks into the dim glare of the atrium. A school party has arrived before her, armed with worksheets and clipboards. She zigzags through them, heading for Room V, where, according to the catalogue, the Linear B tablets are housed.
In the Old Palace Room there are finds from the hauntingly-named Anemospilia, the Caves of the Wind: a ceramic bull with tiny acrobats clinging to its horns, a pair of disembodied clay feet. She hasn’t been there yet, but it’s on her itinerary: a must-see, not a maybe.
The site on the shoulder of Mount Iuchtas had been excavated in the 1980s, and ever since then controversy had raged. The earthquake that destroyed the small temple had struck during a ceremony that apparently involved human sacrifice. Three skeletons were recovered from the west room, of which two seemed to be a priest and priestess. On top of the third skeleton- a boy of 17 or so, trussed on an altar – lay a large bronze knife. This poor soul, according to the forensic archaelogists, was already dead when the building collapsed on the others.
Everything she’d read dated the events at 1700 BCE, around the time of the catastrophic earthquakes that destroyed the first Palace. The hypothesis – credible enough, in her opinion, although still fiercely opposed by a few scholars hell-bent on portraying the Minoans as sublimely peaceable folk – was that the victim was offered up in a last-ditch attempt to propitiate the seisichthonic gods.
The clay feet, whose colour reminds her of American Tan stockings, stop just above the ankles, and have short wooden poles in place of legs. She imagines the wooden statue of the goddess on its ox-cart, jolting up the hill to the sanctuary, where the clay feet stood on the altar, waiting patiently to be slotted in.
Room V echoes with the click of cameras. She skulks past the crowd of baggy-shorted Adorants that surrounds the ceramic statue of the Snake Goddess. The statue is bold-eyed, bare-breasted, bell-skirted; next to it, she feels furtive, modern, and deprived.
In a glass display case in the corner are two glazed libation cups with Linear A signs written in cuttlefish ink on the inner rims. The brushstrokes are bold yet delicate, like Chinese calligraphy, but the captioning on the case is sparse, to say the least. A readable transcription would help, but none has been provided. She peers through her own reflection, trying to identify the signs inside. As far as she can make out, none of them add up to the ja-sa-sa-ra sequence of the so-called Minoan Libation Formula.
Some of the schoolkids have escaped their tutor, and are mill
ing about anarchically, emitting ringtones and sundry electronic beeps. From outside comes the periodic thunder of pneumatic drills. There’s no air-conditioning in the Museum, and the windowless room is so stuffy it’s a wonder the Nordic-looking tourists don’t faint away in the clammy heat.
The case which contains the Linear B tablets is in the centre of the room. It’s about the size of a coffee-table, waist-high and free-standing. Inside it there are so few tablets that she wonders if she’s made a mistake. She checks the catalogue again, which confirms that the Linear B finds are housed exclusively here in Room V.
She shakes her head in disbelief. The Museum has a vast hoard of tablets; in no way is she looking at a representative sample.
There are only six ‘livestock’ tablets in the case. Tiny things, no bigger than a postcard, really. Postcards from prehistory. The tablets gleam dark gold in their preserving varnish. Although the script is needle-thin the signs are well-formed, as if written by a practised hand. They’re made of clay, of course, but the material that comes to mind is beeswax. The visual analogue is oddly alluring. Beeswax, after all, would have been a supple, malleable medium, easy to recycle. A single pass with a hot knife and the surface would be smooth and blank again. But unlike clay, which had been baked hard by the fires that destroyed the final palaces, and thus preserved for posterity, beeswax would simply have melted away. Could this be the reason why Linear A finds were so scanty, compared with Linear B? Transience is the sworn enemy of archaeology; ceramic, stone, metal – those are the durable, desirable materials, the ones that bear the forensic traces.
A civilisation born out of silence, returning to silence: all the molten honey of its words pouring away down the open stone conduits of Knossos.
The only chair in the room is already occupied by a uniformed attendant. Clutching the transcriptions of the Knossos tablets in one hand – she doesn’t dare to spread them out on the glass top of the case – Ingrid extracts her reading-glasses with the other.
Anticipation makes her clumsy, like a girl on her first date. She leafs rapidly through her photocopies, searching for a visual match with the tablets. Logograms and syllabograms dance before her eyes. For a moment she’s back in the classroom, confounded by the incomprehensible symbols on the blackboard.
People passing by have stopped to stare, not at the tablets, which aren’t particularly visually arresting, but at Ingrid, whose rapt attentiveness seems to have created a focal point. She spreads her elbows to clear a space for scholarship, hoping that its intimidating aura will drive the idly curious off towards the half-million other more charismatic objects they could, after all, be gawping at.
It dawns on her then that the logical approach – which she prepared for, systematically, only a few days ago, but in her jittery state has managed to forget – is to compare the numbers on her list with the numbers on the exhibits. And after a moment, there it is. H 304, with its improbable, galumphing herd of 100 male animals. Displayed so badly that the script is almost unreadable through the top-reflections on the glass.
She stares at it, feeling absolutely blank.
Alice would be calm, she thinks, methodical. She wouldn’t stand here blinded by reflections. She’d get her hands on the thing, pore over it with a magnifying glass, subject it to thorough autopsy. Self-doubt wouldn’t enter the equation.
The awareness makes her even more flustered. She forces herself to check off all the numbers on her list. To her dismay, H 304 is the only one of Alice’s Livestock tablets in the case.
So where on earth are the others?
She should have waited, perhaps, for the Museum to respond to her emails. But how long would that have taken? Weeks? Months?
Her anger is restorative, propelling her back through the galleries to the atrium. To the left of the counter which sells postcards and catalogues, a stone stairway leads down to the basement. A notice on the wall warns Staff Only.
At the top of the steps an attendant stands guard: a stocky woman whose uniform shirt juts over a wedge of breasts. As she moves to bar the way Ingrid flaps the photocopies under her nose.
‘These tablets are not on display! I must see the Ephor.’
‘You have appointment?’
Ingrid frowns over her reading glasses: it’s hardly her fault if she hasn’t. ‘I have come from England!’ she says grandly, as if this should be enough to remind the woman who put the Minoans on the map in the first place. Sir Arthur Evans, she’s sure, never took no for an answer.
A man comes light-footed up the staircase and pauses on the step below her. She glimpses a pale blue shirt, black and silver epaulettes.
‘It’s Ms Laurie, isn’t it? There is a problem?’
With a shock of embarrassment she recognises the Sergeant
‘Cherete,’ she greets him, hoping against hope that he didn’t hear her overdrawing on national credit. Whipping the glasses off her nose, she explains the dilemma of the tablets.
The Sergeant nods judiciously. ‘So, an archaeologist.’ It’s not a question but a statement. Resting a hand on the banister rail, he speaks soberly to the female guard. Ingrid can’t help noticing that he’s assumed, consciously or not, the relaxed pose of the classical kouros – one bent knee producing the understated torque at the hip, the chest quiet, the head inclined slightly on the neck.
Apollo, not Dionysus, she thinks, with a little jolt of the heart.
A pall of respect has settled on the attendant’s face. She glances at Ingrid and nods grudgingly.
‘Endaxi.’
The Sergeant – Stephanoudakis, she remembers, is his name – turns back to her, trim as a pin in his uniform shirtsleeves. On his face is the scrupulous smile of officialdom.
‘It’s okay,’ he says, standing aside to let her pass, ‘You can go ahead now.’
Warmth rises to her cheeks. In broad daylight his self-possession gives the lie to the night and the music, confirming them in her mind as elements of some overheated dream, the kind you wake from embarrassed and alone. Despite herself, she feels the sting of rejection.
‘Thank you so much!’ she cries, smiling glassily. Stuffing the papers into her briefcase, she starts down the stairs.
‘It’s a building site down there, I’m afraid.’ His frown is rueful and suddenly intimate. His eyes are on her, soft eyes, like a deer’s. ‘I hope you can find what you’re looking for.’
Sergeant Stephanoudakis was right. She threads her way past tool-boxes and stepladders and circuit-boxes which hang from the walls, sprouting naked wires. A glass partition which used to divide the administrative offices from the corridor has been removed. Inside, ceiling plaster has been stripped back to the lathes, desks and computers swathed in polythene.
In a small office further along the corridor a semblance of order reigns amidst the wreckage. There’s a potted begonia on the desk, a tray with a flask of coffee and a china cup. When Ingrid puts her head round the door a handsome, harassed woman with greying blonde hair looks up from her laptop.
‘Signome? You are the Ephor? I emailed you about my visit, but received no reply.’
The woman places the object she‘s been holding carefully on the blotter; it’s snail-shaped, made of terracotta, with regular piercings, around it a coiled snake in bas-relief.
‘The Ephor will not be here until 4 today. Perhaps I can help you?’ Although she’s smiling politely, her tone betrays her unwillingness.
Ingrid produces her photocopies, stamped with the magic words Ashmolean Museum.
‘I have come to see these livestock tablets, but I believe they must be in store?’
The woman’s face lightens visibly. She shakes her head. ‘Our storerooms are closed. I’m afraid it will be impossible to view the tablets at this moment.’
Ingrid stares at the snail-like object, realising that it is, in fact, a model of a beehive. ‘Until when?’
The woman shrugs. Her hands describe a future that is limitless. For a moment Ingrid is speechless. A brick wal
l is the one eventuality she never stopped to consider. ‘So what do you suggest?’ she asks, if only to save face. She knows, really, that it’s hopeless. ‘I should email?’
‘I’m very sorry. As you can see, we have chaos in the building.’
Outside in the courtyard light and sound merge into a single entity. The sun, high now, rages down on Ingrid; traffic hurries, hooting, around the roundabout of Platia Eleftherias. The feeling of failure flattens everything, spoils her for the ordinary world. Of course she can tell herself that 60 years ago Alice was in the same boat, but there isn’t much comfort in the irony.
It occurs to her for the first time to ask why she felt compelled to see these particular tablets, what exactly she expected to gain. It isn’t as if 3000 year old accounts raise her to a pitch of intoxication, as they would a genuine epigrapher. Idle curiosity aside, there’s nothing on them that could tell her what she really wants to know about Alice. Like some pilgrim aching for a sight of Compostela or the Dome of the Rock, she simply let blind fervour drive her on.
The Museum Cafe, predictably, is closed for renovation. Putting her sunglasses on, she lights a cigarette and looks around for signs of coffee.
In the far corner of the forecourt a temporary kiosk is selling soft drinks to the tourists. Too late, she sees the Sergeant standing by the stall, one elbow resting on the counter; even the shadow of the awning can’t disguise his air of patient watchfulness. Through the railings she sees the patrol car, parked casually on the kerb.
He hails her as she approaches. ‘You had some success?’
Ingrid shakes her head. ‘Total failure, to be honest.’
