Free The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox Page B

knew Linear B was largely syllabic, the presence of so many pictographic symbols would ultimately seduce him, severely hampering his efforts to decipher it. As a result, his assault on the script would occupy him for much of the next forty years.
    DURING THESE YEARS, scholars around the world were clamoring to see the tablets. “No effort will be spared to publish the whole collected material at the earliest possible moment,” Evans had proclaimed in print after the first season’s dig. But when, in 1909, he published Scripta Minoa , his three-hundred-page book on the Cretan scripts, only about two dozen pages were devoted to Linear A and B combined. The rest of the text was given over to Evans’s painstaking description of the earlier, hieroglyphic script of Crete. (While the book expounded on the symbolism of individual hieroglyphic characters, the author did not attempt to translate the hieroglyphic inscriptions themselves, a feat he wisely deemed impossible.) Although Evans promised additional volumes giving full accounts of the linear scripts, none materialized in his lifetime. As generations of would-be decipherers chafed bitterly, the Knossos tablets remained locked away.
    Evans had his reasons. Under a time-honored anthropological tradition that owes much to the colonial imperative, the first investigator to set foot in a village or excavate a ruin retains an unspoken proprietary interest in the place. Future claimants enter at their peril. But there is also a tacit if unspecified time limit by which the original scholar must publish. If he fails to do so, then his turf is fair game.
    As the first decades of the twentieth century ticked away, Evans’s time limit appeared to have stretched to unsporting length. Though he gave numerous accounts of his finds to mainstream papers like the Times of London, he published little significant analysis of the tablets in scholarly journals. Not only did he decline to make most of the tablets themselves available for study, but he also appeared loath to publish drawings or photographs of them: Of the more than two thousand tablets Evans eventually unearthed at Knossos, he would publish reproductions of fewer than two hundred during his lifetime. (In the 1930s, Johannes Sundwall, a distinguished Finnish scholar, published copies of thirty-eight tablets he had managed to see in a Cretan museum, an act that brought down the wrath of Evans.)
    In fairness, Evans had many distractions. He remained keeper of the Ashmolean till 1908, and his duties there took time. At home in England, he was active in a string of professional organizations, serving more or less simultaneously as president of the Hellenic Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Royal Numismatic Society, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. (For his services to archaeology, Evans was knighted in 1911.) He was also involved in good works, in particular with the local Boy Scout troop, which he gave the run of Youlbury’s grounds. Having no children of his own, he took in two wards, first a nephew of Margaret’s and, shortly afterward, the son of an Oxfordshire tenant farmer.
    With the start of World War I in 1914, digging on Crete became impossible for the duration. Evans was still deeply involved in Balkan affairs, and even before the war’s end in 1918, he was taking an active hand in the negotiations that led to the creation of the Yugoslav state.
    He was also building three houses. The first was Youlbury, an ongoing project that eventually comprised some two dozen bedrooms, a sunken Roman bath, orchards, magnificent gardens, and a great deal else. Its vaulted marble entrance hall, which looked like nothing so much as a Beaux Arts savings bank and could have housed one comfortably, had a mosaic floor set in a labyrinth pattern, with a tiled Minotaur at the center. Standing imposingly nearby were two huge replicas, carved in mahogany, of the throne of