The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox

Author:Margalit Fox [Fox, Margalit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062228864
Amazon: B009NQZPCU
Barnesnoble: B009NQZPCU
Published: 2013-07-21T07:58:39+00:00

published, others will start the necessary … classifications and all our work will be thrown overboard. If [the publication of the tablets]

happens during the coming year, I ‘ ll be very happy, but if several years pass (and they have a way of slipping away) it would be silly”

to continue working separately.

In the fall of 1 948, Blegen at last gave Bennett permission to share the Pylos inscriptions. “Happy, happy day ! ” Kober wrote on hearing the news. By coincidence, Myres had relaxed the embargo on the Knossos data at around that time. Kober could now share the inscriptions she had copied in Oxford with other scholars privately, he said, though everyone would have to wait until Scripta Minoa II came out to publish anything based on them.

“If Bennett is willing, ” Kober wrote gleefully to Myres at the end of October, “I’ll exchange a set of my drawings for one of the Pylos inscriptions. I didn’ t know I had horse-trading Yankee blood in my veins, but apparently I do. ”

By the end of the year, after some more delicate diplomacy-bymail that reads like a negotiation for the exchange of hostages, Kober was traveling to Yale to look at Bennett’ s inscriptions and he was traveling to New York to look at hers. Bennett, who was then comparing the handwritings of the various scribes and liked to spread out a blizzard of photos for scrutiny, once wrote to ask whether she had “a large, well-tabled room” at her disposal. Kober offered the use of the Ping-Pong table in the basement of her home, but alas, he replied, it would not suffice, for “the last time I did it …

I eventually covered about three or four ten-foot library tables. ”

Their first order of business was to compile a definitive sign list

-a signary, paleographers call it-containing all the characters used in the mainland and Cretan versions of the script. This was no simple task: The Knossos inscriptions alone still lacked a standard signary after almost half a century. Now, with the Pylos material added, the problem became even more difficult. In the end, the Linear B signary would not be finalized until 1 95 1 , a project completed by Bennett and Ventris the year after Kober’ s death.

“There are a few signs that must be added to our lists, and in my case, at least, all the vocabulary lists must be revised, ” Kober wrote Bennett that June. “You can imagine what a job it is to go through all the inscriptions and check these things again. . . . I must now convince Sir John Myres that the sign list must be changed to include [the Pylos data] , and he does not want to do it. I do not want to do it either, but there is now no doubt in my mind that it must be done. ”

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