THE CODEBREAKERS

by DAVID KAHN

  It must not be thought that every script has surrendered. Many remain books sealed with seven seals. Etruscan, written in Latin letters and contemporaneous with the early Latin culture, is one of the most tantalizing. It is a Case II problem which has been partly solved. A few words have been identified with a fair degree of probability, but the 8,000 texts are too stereotyped (many are funerary inscriptions) and too brief (many are mere fragments) to allow much progress to be made in reconstructing the language. The few bilinguals that exist (with Latin) are epitaphs. The state of the question can be dramatized by pointing out that disagreement is rife concerning even the numbers, which have been found in written form on dice.

  The hieroglyphics of the Indus Valley civilization, which flourished in the northwest corner of India more than 4,000 years ago, remain unread. During World War II, HroznÝ, then in his dotage, mounted an attack upon all the undeciphered scripts of the world and announced a decipherment of the approximately 250 signs of the Indus Valley script, but other scholars have discredited it. Some investigators see a resemblance between this script and that of the “talking boards” of Easter Island. A number of the signs do look surprisingly alike, but their enormous separation in time and space makes it most unlikely that they have any connection. Easter Island natives call the writing rongo-rongo, and their tradition holds that bards merely used the little figures of what appear to be men and plants as cues for a whole line in a story. None of the native informants could actually explain the 500 symbols when they were discovered in 1870, but Thomas S. Barthel has recently claimed to have deciphered the talking-board writing.

  Many would-be decipherers have exercised their ingenuity upon the Phaistos Disk, a circular tablet six inches in diameter, found at Phaistos in Crete in 1902. Its 241 signs were printed into the fine-grained clay with stamps; the writing uncoils from the center in five spirals on both sides. Forty-five highly pictorial representations of humans, animals, tools, and body parts form the signary. This has led to statistical calculations that the original signary had between 50 and 60 pictograms. The disk apparently dates from about 1700 B.C. Many solutions have been announced. None has been generally accepted.

  A Case III problem which has caused many a sleepless night is that of the Maya hieroglyphics. It remains unconquered, despite a recent onslaught by that all-conquering of modern weapons, the digital computer. Three young Soviet mathematicians from the Novosibirsk Institute of Mathematics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, E. V. Yevreinov, Y. G. Kosarev, and V. A. Ustinov, became the first to apply a computer to a decipherment problem. They assumed that the most frequent Mayan glyphs would represent the written form of the most frequent sounds of the Mayan language. The language, and its sounds, were known primarily from Mayan texts written by their priests in the alphabet of the conquistadores, secondarily from two Maya-Spanish dictionaries compiled at the same time, thirdly from the degenerate form of Mayan still spoken in Yucatan. The mathematicians codified the 60,000 words of these texts on the punched cards and magnetic drums that served as the computer’s memory. They found that 70 letter-pairs in the texts accounted for half the word-beginnings, and that 73 glyphs similarly accounted for half the word-beginnings. On this basis they predicated an identity between the two groups, and, by correlating other relationships between endings and medial groups in a lightning 40-hour electronic “decipherment,” concluded that they had solved the Mayan writing. Sample solutions: “The young maize god fires pottery from white clay”; “The woman’s burden is the god of war.” But criticism both as to their general method and as to details of result has razed this elaborate structure.

  Of all the decipherments of history, the most elegant, the most coolly rational, the most satisfying, and withal the most surprising occurred in 1952. The story begins, as all stories of the Aegean must, with Troy.

  In the 1870s, a wealthy German businessman who refused to accede to the general opinion that the Iliad and the Odyssey were pure myth proved his dogged belief that they enclosed a germ of truth. Heinrich Schliemann discovered the site of the historical Troy at the 85-foot mound of Hissarlik in Turkey three miles from the sea. He unearthed the thick circuit walls around which Achilles dragged Hector’s body and which only the trickery of the wooden horse had breached. He found golden cups in what he thought was Priam’s treasure. The site was right but his dating was wrong by a thousand years. He thought that the second level of the oft-rebuilt city was Homer’s Troy; an American expedition in the 1930s under Dr. Carl W. Blegen of the University of Cincinnati showed that the much later seventh level of Troy was the Ilium that Homer had immortalized.

  Homer had also sung of “Mycenae rich in gold,” and Schliemann, again trusting the poet, promptly dug up at Mycenae on the mainland of Greece a circle of royal graves in which the interred kings wore crowns and death masks of gold. He thought that these were the tombs of Agamemnon, “king of men,” ruler of Mycenae, overlord of all the Greeks in the Trojan War, and of his Trojan captive Cassandra, both murdered soon after his return by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. As with Troy, Schliemann was hundreds of years too early. But his instincts were magnificently right.

  A young British archeologist named Arthur Evans became curious about the writing that he felt must have been used by the wealthy and cultured inhabitants of this era. He found some engraved gems in Greece that had some appearance of script, traced them to Crete, and began to dig at Knossos. He discovered writing, as he had hoped, but the stupendous nature of his other discoveries soon drove this modest original goal out of his mind.

  For Evans had excavated the spectacular ruins of an advanced ancient civilization. He had found the vast palace of the legendary King Minos, so rambling and so confused in plan that it might well have given rise to the myth that Minos built a labyrinth in which to pen the Minotaur, the monstrous offspring of his own queen and a bull. Evans saw wall frescoes of youths grasping the horns of a bull and being tossed onto its back—the bull-dancers that intimated that some elements of the story of the Minotaur, filtered through the dark lenses of legend, were the race-memory of actual events. Scattered through the palace were representations of the royal symbol, the two-headed ax, in such profusion that Evans called the palace the House of the Double Ax. The civilization he named Minoan, after its legendary founder.

  Evans had begun his excavations in March of 1900. On the 31st of the month he unearthed the first clay tablet with the writing he had originally sought; on the 6th of April he found a whole hoard of inscribed tablets. Some were embedded in charred wood, presumably the remains of the wooden box in which they were originally stored. The dull gray tablets came in two shapes, a long and narrow “palm-leaf” type and a 5 × 10-inch “page” type. The Cretans did not bake the tablets but merely dried them; a leak in one of Evans’ roofs once reduced a boxful to a pulpy mass. The clay still held the fingerprints of the scribes who had patted them flat. Most tablets were broken, but often the fragments could be joined together.

  Evans found four kinds of writing. The oldest appeared as three-dimensional carvings on gems like those that had started his quest and on seals an inch across. It was markedly pictographic, and Evans called it the Hieroglyphic Script of Class A, though it bore no relation to the hieroglyphs of Egypt. He found a stylized form of this written on clay which he called the Hieroglyphic Script of Class B, and he traced further simplifications of this into two forms of cursive writing, much more linear than the hieroglyphs, on the tablets. Evans called one the Linear Script of Class A, and the other, the most recent of the four scripts, the Linear Script of Class B. Linear A was found at locations all over Crete, while Linear B was found only at Knossos. They had not coexisted; Linear B replaced Linear A. The relationship among the four was not entirely clear. Some forms progressively simplified from Hieroglyphic A to B to Linear A to B. But Linear B has some signs that do not exist in Linear A, and some Linear B forms are more complex than their apparent Linear A counterparts. The linear scripts run from l
eft to right.

  The individual signs of Linear B are rather fanciful and resemble a whole variety of objects—a Gothic arch enclosing a vertical line, a ladder, a heart with a stem running through it, a bent trident with a barb, a three-legged dinosaur looking behind him, an A with an extra horizontal bar through it, a backward S, a tall beer glass, half full, with a bow tied on its rim; dozens look like nothing at all in this world. Evans counted 70 in common use (there were about 90 altogether), and presumed from this and from the average number of signs included between the upright lines that often divided the words that “it is probable that the signs have a syllabic value.”

  The Linear B tablets appeared to be primarily inventories, lists, business documents. In addition to the signs, they bore pictograms of horses, chariots, wheels, men, women, swords, cereals, and so forth, accompanied by strokes that evidently indicated the number of the depicted item in a decimal system. Several tablets were found with a totaling entry on the bottom line. Some tablets were indexed on their edges so that the bookkeeper would not have to pull out a whole batch to get the one he needed.

  Evans classified the tablets into groups suggested by their pictograms—olive culture, saffron culture, cereals, flocks and herds, chariots, and so on. He divided the signs themselves into four groups based on phonetic, ideographic, numerical, or agricultural associations. He listed what appeared to be male and female names, counted sign-occurrences in the male group, and suggested that regular changes in names in the female group constituted “good evidences of declension.” He identified what he claimed were determinatives for royal and religious words. He remarked that one sign looked much like a Semitic letter, wisely stopping short of making the unsubstantiated suggestion that they both represented the same sound.

  He did not read the script. The basis for the decipherment—the language underlying the writing—remained unknown. Historical considerations pointed strongly in a certain direction, however.

  Evans believed that the Minoan civilization that he had uncovered had dominated the mainland Greeks from its inception to its fall. As evidence, he cited early features that were original at Knossos and derivative in the contemporaneous Mycenaean civilization discovered by Schliemann—primarily similar architecture and the so-called Palace style of pottery. Given this “Knossocentric” premise, there followed inexorably the corollary that the language of Linear B was related to Semitic or Etruscan or Hittite or to the language of whatever racial stock, probably non-Indo-European, that had first ruled in Crete. Had the language of Linear B been the Greek that the Mycenaeans presumably spoke—which seemed improbable in the first place, because the script presumably would have been a relatively easy Case I solution—Evans’ thesis would have been untenable. But an apparent demonstration that the language was not Greek seemed to prove the Minoan hegemony.

  Linear B strikingly resembled the writing used centuries later on the nearby Mediterranean island of Cyprus. The general configurations of the characters agreed, and some signs matched perfectly. Scholars could read the Cypriote script, in use from 700 to 100 B.C., because the English Assyriologist George Smith had deciphered it in the 1870s. The number of its characters—55—had convinced him that they represented syllables. In a bilingual inscription of Phoenician and Cypriote, Smith picked out the two Cypriote words corresponding to the two Phoenician occurrences of “king.” The next-to-last signs in the Cypriote differed from one word to the other. From their positions in the text, Smith decided that the differences resulted from declension—one form being the nominative case, “king,” the other the genitive case, “of the king.” He then looked for a neighboring language in which the next-to-last syllables of the word “king” varied from the nominative to genitive. He found the Greek basileús, nominative, and basiléōs, genitive. With this and the help of proper names, “I thus obtained, with more or less certainty, the phonetic values of eighteen of the Cypriote characters, and I tried by means of this help to decipher the remainder of the inscription. Unfortunately, the parts of the Cypriote inscription which contained the rest of the proper names were mutilated….” On the evidence of basileús and other similarities with Greek, he thought that “the language was allied to, although not the same as, the Greek.” At this point Smith quit the problem, partly because he could not go any further, partly because he was about to set out on the expedition that was to find the Babylonian tablets of the Flood and the Gilgamesh Epic.

  His work was continued by others, particularly Samuel Birch, Johannes Brandis, and Moriz Schmidt. Eventually it became clear that the language was Greek, but written in a script so utterly unlike the familiar alphabetic system of Greek that it seemed mangled almost beyond recognition. The signs of this script could represent only pure vowels or syllables in the form of consonant-vowel; single consonants, vowel-consonant groups, and consonant-vowel-consonant groups were excluded. Among other peculiarities, the script did not distinguish the sounds of /ta, da, tha/, but used a single sign for all of them. It ignored nasals before a consonant: “panta” (“all”) was written pa-ta. It wrote consonants at the end of a word with an unpronounced auxiliary vowel: “theois” (“to the gods”) becomes te-o-i-se. A syllable beginning with two consonants had to be written as if with two syllables. All this imparted a barbarous awkwardness to the written language of the Greeks of Cyprus, which was contemporary and similar to that spoken by the mainland Greeks during their Golden Age. The Greek “anthropos” (“man”) appeared in Cypriote as a-to-ro-pose.

  Evans pointed out the similarity of this script to the Cretan ones and may even have tried to decipher Linear A and B with the Cypriote values. If so, he failed, as others who did try it later failed. A singular fact seemed to ratify this failure. The most common final consonant in Greek is s, which the Cypriote script rendered as se. Now, the Cypriote sign for se is identical to one of the Linear B signs. But in Linear B this sign rarely ends words. This phenomenon repelled the hypothesis that Greek underlay Linear B. The failures, plus this linguistic evidence, reinforced Evans’ archeological evidence for his Knossocentric thesis of Crete’s dominance over Greece. His own magisterial prestige soon elevated it to orthodoxy.

  Yet a few brave heretics challenged it. Brave they had to be: one, Alan J. B. Wace, paid for his impudence with an unwanted retirement from the British School in Athens in 1923 and with exclusion from work in the Minoan field for several years. The heretics differed with Evans only for the period from 1450 B.C. to the end of the Bronze Age in 1125 B.C. These years encompassed the heroic age of Greece and the Trojan War (about 1240 B.C.) and are consequently of supreme importance; the Linear B tablets were written during this time. Both schools of thought agreed that, earlier in the Bronze Age, before 1450, Crete prevailed in the Aegean. The legend of Athens’ subjugation to Minos and its annual tribute of seven youths and seven maidens to the Minotaur, eventually slain by the Athenian hero Theseus, may mount from this time as a kind of literary artifact. This period, in which Linear A was used, ended with the destruction, by earthquake and fire, of the original Palace of Minos.

  Wace and the others felt that Evans had ignored important evidence for the questioned years. Archeological evidence, such as size of palaces, increasingly showed that the mainland was rising in power and influence during and just prior to these years and that Crete was declining. This, Wace thought, made a mainland domination of Crete more likely than the reverse.

  A 1939 discovery gave this theory an enormous boost. After finishing his work at Troy, Carl Blegen excavated at Pylos in Greece. He unearthed the palace of Nestor, the oldest of the Greek chieftains at Troy, wise and garrulous, one of the Argonauts who sailed with Jason in quest of the Golden Fleece. Blegen’s very first trench ran through the archives room, where he found 600 fragments of clay tablets inscribed in Linear B. If Linear B represented the language of Minoan culture, why should it be found only at Knossos and nowhere else on its native Crete, and yet be in use by a Greek king for keeping his accounts on the mainland far f
rom its home? Wace theorized that Pylos was a home of Linear B and that conquering Greeks brought it to Knossos. Unfortunately, this virtually required Linear B to be Greek, and the probabilities appeared to stand strongly against this. Evans’ words boomed out in victorious affirmation of this thesis: “… there is no palace either at Mycenae or at Thebes for Greek-speaking dynasts … the culture, like the language, was still Minoan to the core.”

  Despite Evans’ confidence, only the solution of the language could definitely confirm or deny his statement. And this looked far off. Evans had, in 1909, published the hieroglyphic inscriptions then known and a couple of the Linear A tablets from Knossos in his folio-sized Scripta Minoa I, but only 14 of the approximately 1,600 Linear B tablets that he had unearthed. In 1935, he presented 120 more during a richly suggestive 160-page discussion of them in the second part of the fourth and final volume of his magnum opus, The Palace of Minos. But he never carried out his intention of publishing the main corpus of the tablets in successive volumes of the Scripta Minoa series, and at his death in 1941, aged 90, it was still closed to scholars. Custom in archeology gives the discoverer the privilege of publishing his finds first, but it imposes in return the duty of publishing them promptly. Evans has therefore been taxed with depriving two generations of scholars of the opportunity of working on Linear B. The only other Linear B texts that were generally known were 38 of the Knossian tablets, published by the Finnish professor Johannes Sundwall, who incurred Evans’ displeasure for even that small breach of archeological etiquette. World War II forced Blegen to cache his trove in the vaults of the Bank of Athens and prevented him from publishing it.

  Despite the insufficiency of material, many would-be decipherers had attacked the puzzle. In 1931, for example, F. G. Gordon went Through Basque to Minoan and came out in a never-never land in which the Knossos inventories read like elegiac poems. Miss Florence Melian Stawell dared to counter Evans by seeing Greek in the Minoan scripts. She arbitrarily assigned a syllabic or alphabetic value to each hieroglyphic or Linear A sign based on the Greek name of the object shown on the tablets, permitting herself a good many terms “which had died out before Homer.” Difficulties with Linear B compelled her to read each sign as a whole word, with the absurd result that the words, which were divided by vertical lines, became in her view whole sentences.