Threats of Pain and Ruin by Theodore Dalrymple

Author:Theodore Dalrymple
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: New English Review Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

‘I went to Bangladesh once,’ he said.

‘Anywhere else?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been to England.’

That’s real integration for you: a Llanelli man, born and bred, who thinks of England as a foreign country. For a brief moment I almost felt optimistic.

20 - Non-Linear B

Such was the state of historical knowledge, or perhaps I should say ignorance, of my young patients that I was most favourably impressed whenever a young man deduced by his own unaided efforts that there must have been a First World War because there had been a Second.

However, everyone’s knowledge is always finite, while everyone’s ignorance is always infinite: so the comparatively learned have little cause to look down their noses on the unlearned because of their ignorance, which after all is only equal to their own. Indeed, in so far as one of the objects of learning is the attainment of wisdom as well as mere knowledge for its own sake, pride in learning is especially vulgar and reprehensible. The learned above all people should appreciate the eternal appropriateness of modesty.

Therefore I do not blush to record that I once made a deduction very similar to that of my patients who concluded from the fact that there had been a Second World War that there had been a first: namely that, if there had been a Linear B script of Minoan writing there must have been a Linear A. Of neither did I know anything.

Nevertheless, the phrase ‘Linear B’ that has always resonated in my mind in a way that the phrase ‘Linear A’ has not. Is it merely that the former is more euphonious than the latter? Or could it be a faint echo from my very early childhood, not so much a memory as a shadow of a memory, when Linear B was first deciphered and the man who did it enjoyed, or rather did not enjoy, sudden fame and prominence? Could it be that, when I was 3 years old, everyone talked about it and that it left some very faint residue in my mind?

The decipherment of Linear B was a tremendous intellectual achievement of the kind completely beyond my powers, or the powers of an almost incomparably enormous proportion of mankind. Linear B was a form of writing found on tablets at Knossos in Crete in the early part of the last century by the distinguished archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. The writing consisted of 89 characters, spindly in form, some of which clearly resembled ideograms. They were of pre-Homeric date; what sound the characters represented, what language whose written form they were, was completely unknown. There was no Rosetta stone to assist in the decipherment of the writing; it resembled somewhat writing discovered in Cyprus, and later some very similar inscriptions were found in Greece, but otherwise there was no clue.

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