Free The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox

morning to find the precious unbaked records reduced to mud.
    In other parts of the palace, however, where the flames had burned hotter, tablets were baked to a permanent hardness. “In this way fire—so fatal elsewhere to historic libraries!—has acted as a preservative of these earlier records,” Evans wrote after the first season’s dig.
    But baking also made the tablets dry and brittle, and whenever Evans unearthed a cache of inscribed clay shards, his first job was to fit them back together again like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Often, fragments of a single tablet were widely separated, scattered by animals and earthquakes. (Parts of some tablets were so far-flung they would not be reunited for decades.) Making the job even harder was the fact that pieces of a single tablet might bake at different temperatures—some wound up closer to the fire’s center, others farther away. When this happened, they shrank at different rates. The result was a tablet whose disjointed parts no longer looked as though they had ever fit together.
    Once Evans had enough complete tablets to work with, he could start to compare the two linear scripts, A and B. He had unearthed just a few Linear A tablets at Knossos. (As it turned out, they would be the only significant examples of the script ever found there.) But in 1902, a colleague, the Italian archaeologist Federico Halbherr, uncovered a cache of Linear A tablets at Hagia Triada, a site in southern Crete. With these, Evans had a sufficient sample for comparison.
    The A and B scripts had in common more than fifty characters that were identical or nearly so. Both scripts had been used by Cretan scribes to record commodities vital to the local economy: grain, oil, livestock, wine, and the like. (There were some additional Linear A inscriptions, found on ceremonial artifacts, that contained what appeared to be religious dedications.) In both scripts, text was written from left to right. Where Linear B almost always indicated word breaks (usually by means of the vertical tick marks), Linear A did so only sometimes, using a variety of devices, like little dots between groups of signs. Unlike the Linear B tablets, Linear A tablets were nearly always unruled, and in general the A script looked cruder. It was quite reasonable to assume, as Evans did, that the B script was a later, more refined outgrowth of the A, and indeed this turned out to be the case.
    Before the decipherment of either script could begin, Evans needed to answer an essential question: Did they record the same language? He thought they did—they were too similar-looking for it to be otherwise. “The conclusion has been drawn,” he wrote, “that the language itself was practically identical and that the differences visible in B must be rather due to dynastic than to racial causes.”
    Besides sharing individual characters, the two scripts shared a means of writing numbers. In unearthing the Knossos palace, Evans had uncovered the first European bureaucracy, and the tablets, he knew, were the palace’s account books. With civilization comes stuff, and with stuff comes the need to keep track of it. Not surprisingly, the palace scribes were great enumerators. The tablets filed neatly away by subject counted everything in the Cretan kingdom from sheep, horses, and swine to footstools, bathtubs, chariot wheels (intact), and chariot wheels (broken). Other tablets contained what appeared to Evans to be census data about the kingdom’s human inhabitants—who ran the gamut from monarchs to slaves—including their tax records. As a result, Linear B tablets teemed with numbers.
    These tablets from Knossos count sheep (), goats (), cattle (), and swine ().
    Arthur J. Evans , The Palace of Minos, Volume IV
    Evans was able to work out the numerical system quickly. The Cretans used a base-10 system, like our own decimal system. Unlike ours, it was notated by means of only five