Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox

Author:Margalit Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The “Man” tablet.

Other inventories, marked with the logogram , listed women’s names.

As Kober studied the inventories, she spied a pattern. Lists of men’s names always used one particular form of “total”: . Lists of women’s names always used the other form: . The difference in form, she realized, could well represent a difference in inflection—specifically, a difference in gender. Many languages inflect their nouns and adjectives for gender: In Spanish, for instance the masculine noun viejo means “old man”; its feminine counterpart, vieja, means “old woman.” Kober deduced that in the language of the tablets, was a masculine form of “total” and a feminine.

As she examined the lists of women, she noticed something else. The “woman” logogram was sometimes accompanied by the words and . As Kober also observed, whenever the word appeared, the masculine form of “total” was used before the tally. Whenever appeared, the feminine form was used. Therefore, she concluded, meant “boy,” and meant girl. (The lists turned out to be records of food rations dispensed by the Knossos palace to slave women and their children.)

By solving the gender problem for people, Kober also solved it for animals. The animal logograms of Linear B also took two forms, one with a barred stem (, , , , and ), the other with a V-shaped stem (, , , , and ). In lists of animals, she noticed, the masculine form of “total” was used in connection with barred signs, the feminine form with V-shaped ones. With this single observation, she was able to assign meanings to logograms that had remained undifferentiated for nearly half a century:

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