Krishna
This is the story of the deciphering of one of the biggest puzzles in archeology – the language in which Linear B (as it was called), a set of tablets dated to be created in second millennium BC (Aegean Bronze Age), it was unearthed only at the beginning of the twentieth century. The major credit of the cracking of the code (for the cypher but not the meaning) went to Michael Ventris. He, an architect by profession and an amateur at code cracking, succeeded where professionals trying for years failed. He met an early and tragic death soon after he published the code. However, it was found that a woman from Brooklyn (yes, USA) Elizabeth Kober, who did all the groundwork for his success but went unrecognized. She was an amateur too, and worked with paper and ink (manually) laboring away many nights to get her insights. She did not want to do anything with ‘those IBM machines’ as she derisively called the computers.
The story starts with Arthur Evans, who first unearthed the tablets from Crete. He thought it would be deciphered in a year or two; little did he know that as late as the twentieth century, this tablet would defeat valiant deciphering efforts of even the experts. Evans was preceded by Schliemann who dug in Crete but in another location, and found evidence of an ancient but advanced civilization which lived there before the famed Greeks.
Surprisingly, a young Arthur Evans went to the Balkans for archeological purposes but got involved politically, siding with Slavs in their attempt to free themselves from the Ottoman yoke, for which he was inconvenienced and even briefly imprisoned.
It is interesting that Arthur Evans, for all his love of fighting for the downtrodden (Slavs for instance) considered himself a superior race. And was as bigotted as they come. He hated them calling him ‘brother’ since he was so “obviously” superior. The woman he married was a quiet sort but his father in law held similar Aryan supremacy views. Arthur Evans was also so myopic – and refused to wear corrective glasses – that he walked with a stick (that he had named Prodger) and in British winters had to be led around by people to reach his own classrooms!
He then got interested in Greece – he was persona non grata in Ottoman empire anyway! At that time Greek civilization was widely supposed to have started in 776 BC and writing followed later. However, Homer, in his epic (which was orally shared until writing came, according to popular belief) talks of kingdoms cooperating as well as warring in his epics and also sang of writing existing at that time!
Crete, where Evans went to dig also has some interesting back history. Though now a Greek island, its original inhabitants were not Greeks but outsiders. It was part of the Ottoman empire for a while and was repeatedly invaded and conquered and settled by various people. So its population is even today an amalgamation of various settler genes!
The book peels back into how humanity discovered writing and the three different writing systems in the world that live on even today : logic writing where a letter stands for the whole word – Mandarin is an example of this, where letters stand for group of words – Japanese Kanji is an example of this and the more common letters standing for a particular sound – almost all of Indo European languages follow this practice.
In this book also are some gems. For instance the hieroglyphics of Egypt were very hard to decipher because they were in a script unknown (hieroglyphs) and represented an unknown language (pre Arabic, and scholars were unsure of what the precise language was – don’t be fooled by Hollywood movies where everyone speaks in American accented or British accented English!). It was the discovery of Rosetta stone, in the midst of chaotic Napoleonic wars, that provided a key that cracked open the mystery and helped in deciphering the hieroglyphic messages found all over in ancient monuments in Egypt.
And Rosetta, the name itself, refers to an Egyptian town which was locally called Rashid. And equally interestingly, this stone itself was not a kind of dictionary that told you how to decipher hieroglyphics. It was simply an official record of Pharaoh Ptolemy’s time, with the message in three languages : Greek, which modern scholars could read well, hieroglyphics and another Egyptian language called demotic, which is slightly easier to decipher. This opened the door for the entire decryption of hieroglyphic messages.
Evans jealously guarded the tablets from other eyes and himself, though brilliant and made several correct inferences, did not get to decode it. This fell to an amateur lady in Manhattan. She was Alice Kober, a nondescript teacher whose hobby was deciphering these inscriptions. Very patiently, over the years, she acquired tools to do her work, including several languages, even Sanskrit among them, to study how language is constructed! The story moves on to her now.
If you are not a big fan of decryption of unknown languages – and I mean a deep fan wanting to know the techniques employed to tease meaning out of a seemingly random jumble of words and/ or pictures, please do not read this. It is crammed with detailed description of decryption methods and how you go about it, even given a cryptic set of symbols from a Sherlock Holmes novel and how the famous detective cracked it. (Yes, a simpler code so that you will understand what it takes to do for a more difficult puzzle of an entirely different order of complexity).
If you are willing to put up with it, then the description of the efforts Kober undertook and the months if not years she spent in painstakingly collecting and analyzing pattern of symbols (with a tool that is made with a stack of cards and a punch hole at specific locations) makes impressive reading.
But the story descends into the minutiae of Alice’s deciphering process and descriptions of how you use suffixes and link phrases with the help of Latin examples. Unless your prime motive is to learn these techniques, be warned, they are extremely detailed and probably very boring to a casual reader.
She continues to analyze and publishes three articles which help the eventual decipherer later immensely to succeed where others had failed.
She gets mired in university work and takes on helping Myers publish his work – full of errors that she painstakingly corrected – until her illness overwhelms her and then she dies, tragically before her last and most seminal paper was published.
The man who really succeeded is Michael Ventris. He comes from a loveless family; even though he is the only child to his parents, they both were very cold towards him emotionally, influenced by crackpot ideas (Jung was among his mother’s friends as were many intellectuals) of not getting too emotionally close to children. Others were not even allowed to touch him when he was a young boy. Michael seems to have inherited the coldness – his own children reported later that he showed no attention to them. He made an older girl pregnant when he was just 19 and married her. Later they drifted apart and divorced.
When he was a boy of 14 he saw the tablets in a museum in England – shown around by none other than Evans, who was an octogenarian then! This became his life’s obsession.
His mother lost the money and Michael was unable to attend university so he attended architectural school – cheap vocational school and became an architect. He worked on the deciphering of the Linear B scripts in his spare time but obsessively. He also was plagued by bouts of self doubt and backed out of a collaborative session with Myers and Kober! Ran away in fact.
The story shows how he finally cracked the code using many of Kober’s ideas (published in her articles). This was after Kober’s death. He got fame and fortune but still was plagued by self doubt. His end was tragic – at a young age, not yet forty, he died in a car accident under suspicious circumstances, which many interpreted – but never proven – as a suicide.
The stories are interesting but interspersed with too many detailed decryption details. For an aficionado, this is a great book. For a casual reader, not a thrilling book, though the subject matter is obscure, the personalities are interesting and the various folks in the story are colourful. The storytelling is also nice.
But you need enormous patience to go through the decryption details and this book is not for everyone.
Another oddity : I found the epilog as interesting – or arguably more interesting – than the main story. It talks of how much can be gleaned from the mundane recordings of transactions about what life must have been in that society 3500 years ago!
5/10
== Krishna