TOWER OF BABBLE THREE

 

I believe that Michael Ventris dozed off when, well after one in the morning of 6 September, 1956, his car crossed the center line at high speed and slammed head on into a truck pulled over in a “lay-by” on the Barnet Bypass (above)  20 miles from his London home. Seatbelts were still not standard, so the man who broke the "“Linear B code" was killed instantly. The lorry driver insisted the headlamps of his disabled truck were on. And a coroner’s jury even ruled the tragedy an accident. Yet, to this day, there are many who suggest it was a suicide.

There is no question that Michael George Francis Ventris  fit the profile of a person at risk. His upbringing had been coached by the step father to psychoanalysis, Carl Jung (above), who had treated and maybe seduced Michael's mother, Dorothea. He drilled in to her that “Michael was not to be touched by anybody. This was to avoid him having complexes,” she said.  

His father, a gentle and loving man, died of tuberculosis when Michael was a teenager. While still in college Michael married a “rich society beauty”. But when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, his mother lost the income she had inherited from Michael's domineering grandfather. In July of 1940 Dorothea was found dead in a Welsh seaside hotel, having taken an overdose of the first commercially available barbitruate sleeping pill - Barbitone.

Michael dropped out of college in 1942, and then served three years as a navigator aboard a Royal Air Force bomber - a service which suffered a 44 ½ % death rate. Michael's son would say decades later, “My father was a private person...In fact he seemed rather remote” That isolation from his family led to his divorce. Three years before his death Michael Ventris was hailed as having scaled “the Everest of Greek archeology” by decoding the Minoan texts. But it seems that left him with perhaps the most epic case of post-partum depression in history.

Michael's career as an architect had been built promoting team work, but after reaching the linguistic summit of solving Linear B, there were few colleges interested in hiring him.  At 34 years of age he lacked academic credentials in that field. But I still don't think he intended on hitting that truck.

Those who submerse themselves in ancient texts often earn a reputation for being emotionally unstable. In the 1870's George Smith (above), then an assistant at the British museum, was the first man in 5,000 years to read the story of the Assyrian holy man named Utnapishtim,  who survived a great flood by building a boat for his family and animals. 

Smith was so excited by the discovery of what was clearly an early version of Noah's Ark written in cuneiform Assyrian, that he began rushing about, tearing off his clothing. But despite the legends, he was stopped before he got completely naked, and never made it into the hall. Insanity, is not the greatest danger to archaeologists or linguists.  It is being human.

Arthur Evans (above), the legendary archaeologist who between 1900 and 1906 had uncovered the palace at Knossos, on Crete, and had struggled for forty years to read the 5,000 year old language he uncovered scattered about the place.  Evans had engaged and encouraged the greatest linguists in the world to examine the 3,000 baked clay fragments recording the culture's language. He was certain it represented something new in history, and referred to the culture as Minoan and the language as “Linear B”. But when Evans died in May of 1941, he had managed to deciphered just one word: “total”,. It appeared at the bottom of many of the tablets.

Next the American, Professor Alice Kober  (above) took the lead in the search, and methodically cataloged the 90 plus signs used in “Linear B”, discovering the triple suffixes (as in English “Britain/Briton/British”) which seemed to connect the symbols on the fragments. At first, like Evans, Alice thought the mystery language must be “Minoan”. But near the end of her brief life, Alice decided it could be Etruscan. But when she died in 1950, the problem was still unresolved.

Michael Ventris had been familiar with Linear B all his adult life. When he was 13 (above) this “pleasant and humorous, if solitary boy” had encountered Evans at a museum exhibit, and impudently asked if it were true the language was not yet deciphered.

In 1940, at age 18 he had published his first academic paper on Linear B. In 1948 he got his degree in architecture, but he also met Professor Alice Kober, who was visiting  Oxford University, and later corresponded with her. They did not like each other, but Michael cut off the communication only because he was trying to concentrate on architecture. But then, as his Bauhaus minimalist work was falling out of favor, Michael found himself surrendering again to his obsession with decoding Linear B.

Languages always came easily to him. He was raised for a time in Switzerland, the mountain nation with three official languages. Michael was proficient in Spanish, French, German, Polish, Italian, Greek, Ancient Greek and Latin, and, after just one week of exposure, he was participating in conversations in Swedish. But he was having no luck decoding Linear B. 

Then, one evening, while his wife was preparing for a dinner party, the frustrated architect turned to Alice Kober's triplets, and it occurred to him to apply them phonetically to place names, but not in Etruscan but in ancient Greek. What if, he wondered, the first character in a particular triplet was pronounced as “ko”, the next “no” and the last for 'so”? Could it be that simple, that obvious: Knossos? Just then the guest arrived and Michael had to leave his work.

But while his wife was preparing to serve the desert, Michael Ventris stole back to his study. Abruptly the triplet names of several other sites on ancient Crete fell into place. With a start Michael came to the realization that the language of Linear B was not Minoan, or Etruscan, but Greek. Arthur Evans had been wrong. Alice Kober had been wrong. All the hundreds of linguists who had studied Linear B before him had been wrong. 

The truth was so obvious it might have been uncovered decades earlier, except for Arthur Evan's (above) immediate determination that it could not be Greek. Evan's so dominated the study of Knossos, that his fundamental assumption had even confused Alice Kober. Michael returned to the party and shared the excitement with his guests. He did not tear his clothing. But one of the dinner party guest happened to be a producer for BBC Radio, and the next day she put Michael in front of a microphone to share his excitement with the world.

It should have inspired an earthquake of coverage. But 1 July, 1953, the day Michael Ventris walked into the BBC Radio booth and announced his solution to the Linear B puzzle, was the day after Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England, and the same day news broke that a month earlier, on 29 May, 1953,  New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had peaked Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

It did not help that once Linear B was decoded (above), it related no great epics of heroes and gods. The translations merely recounted the inventory of storage rooms, the numbering of everything from livestock, to drinking vessels and furniture, to grain and grapes. It was the tax receipts. But...

"... Because of finger and palm prints and writing styles left by the authors, we now know there were only 100 scribes writing at Knossos, and another 32 at Pylos. These numbers are so low they suggest a religious order restricting access to the knowledge of writing. The priests scribes kept a running total (the first word deciphered by Evans in the 1920's) in the soft clay, wetting it to add and subtract from the inventories. The tablets and their counts would not be fired, and the numbers set in stone, until the palaces containing them burned down, in the Bronze Age Apocalypse of Minoan culture, some time after 1375 B.C..

Two weeks before his terminal accident, Michael Ventris wrote a letter to the editor of the Architect's Journal, the publication of the Architectural Association. Michael was leaving the field, explaining, “I’ve come to the conclusion that...you’d be justified in writing me off...All I can ask you is to temper your justified anger with a little compassion.” It was almost as if Michael had assumed the role of Utnapishtim, and was appealing to his god for understanding. 

Two weeks later Micheal Ventrs was dead. And his achievement and his passing are both proof that for the last 5,000 years and probably the next 5,000, all humans are on the same journey. It is not our achievements or our failures, our insights or our false assumptions that bind us together, not our gods, or our nations, nor even our dreams, our nightmares or aspirations. It is the journey itself.

And that is why the study of Archeology, and Linguistics and psychology, are all important only because they provide perspective about the journey. Utmapsihtim, and King Minos, Arthur Evans and Edmund Hillary, Queen Elizabeth II, Dorothea Ventris, Karl Jung, Alice Kober – they are all fellow travelers, heading to the same destination - oblivion. Best celebrate the trip.

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TOWER OF BABBEL TWO

 

I doubt you would have ever heard of English monk Roger Bacon were it not for his fat Italian friend Gui Foucois, who re-named himself Pope Clement IV in 1265 A.D.   As Pope, Clement the Fat was famous for only three things. First, that he was really fat. Secondly, he really hated Jews. And third, he ordered the “brilliant, combative, and somewhat eccentric” Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon to write a compendium of philosophy and science.  

Bacon's “Opus Majus” laid the foundation for our modern world, beginning with the startling suggestion that since humans are made of the same stuff as the stars, we should be able to understand the stars.  Further, Bacon wrote, "Grammar is one and the same in all languages, substantially, though it may vary, accidentally, in each of them"  He was thus hinting that all languages must at one time have had common ancestors. Eight centuries later, Bacon still appears to be right about both of those ideas. 

It makes you wonder how far Bacon's mind might have taken him (above), and us, had not fat Clement IV died just three years, nine months and twenty days after becoming Pope. With Clement's early demise Roger Bacon lost his financial and moral support, and the Catholic Church lost its compromise leader. 

Roger went right on thinking great thoughts, even when he had to hide them from regressive church superiors (above), inventing the magnifying lens among other things, but since the Cardinals would not chose Clement's successor for three years, Europe had to wait another two hundred years for The Renaissance, which  Roger was trying to midwife into existence. The Black Death putting half of Europe in mass graves did not help, but the singular death of the anti-Semitic fat man was a real blow to the evolution of humanity.

The theory of a Universal Grammar, first postulated by Roger Bacon and most recently by Noam Chomsky, is supported by the existence of “cognates”.   

These are words (about one quarter of the English language) which are called lexical cognates, and their usage in sentences, which share  “the same linguistic family or derivation”, as Bacon pointed out in 1254. Such as:  “la misma familia lingüística o derivación” (Spanish), “a mesma família lingüística ou derivação” (Portuguese), “la stessa famiglia linguistica o derivazione” (Italian), “la même famille linguistique ou dérivation” (French), “la mateixa família lingüística o derivació (Catalan), “din aceeasi familie lingvistice sau derivare” (Romanian)...I could go on for hours. 

The reality of Universal Grammar makes the work of code breaking across languages possible, and drew Alice Elizabeth Kober into the Minoan labyrinth created by little Arthur Evans.  Remember him?

On the day in 1928 when 18 year old Alice Kober (above) received her Bachelor's Degree from Hunter College in Manhattan, she confidently announced she would decode Evan's mysterious Linear B language. It was not that Alice was arrogant. As far as I can tell she had no ego about her science. But she was very, very, very smart. And she knew it.

Alice got her Phd from Columbia in 1932, excavated in Greece, and in 1940, landed a job as an assistant to Sir John Linden Myers, professor of Ancient History at Liverpool University. Myers had worked directly under Professor Arthur Evans. And when age and illness had forced Evans into retirement, Myers took over his work on Linear B. But Myers didn't get very far.

Alice Kober agreed the mother tongue of Minoan was probably Etruscan, a culture which dominated the northern Italian peninsula after about 700 B.C. The rational as handed down from Evans to Myers and now to Alice, was that because the Linear B inscriptions were found on Etruscan amphora at several Minoan sites on Crete, it had to be based, at least in part, on Etruscan. 

During World War Two Professor Myers went to work for the Royal Naval Intelligence service. That left Alice, now a professor herself at Brooklyn College in New York City (above), as the leading expert still working on decoding Linear B. And she decided to make a fresh start.

Alice chose our old friend, frequency analysis. She knew the 90 characters generally acknowledged as Linear B, did not represent a phonetic alphabet like modern languages, but closer to Egyptian hieroglyphics.   Evans himself had suggested it might use voice inflection to define tenses, with the nouns changing their endings to fit past, present and third person perfect. But that also made a paper translation all the more difficult. So Alice began to collect every crumb of information she could about all of the 90 most probable Linear B symbols, as well as the two hundred possible ones. And she taught herself ancient Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian, Sanskrit and Egyptian.

Had this been a modern research project, Alice would have input it all into a computer. But the world's first one of those had just been built to crack the German Enigma codes, and its very existence was so secret, the allies officially referred to it as the “Ultra Secret”.  So Alice had little choice but to use 3X5 inch “index cards”. When the war caused a shortage of those, she scavenged paper from old calendars, greeting cards and catalogues, even stealing library index cards. She carefully filed her homemade index cards into handmade drawers constructed from empty cigarette cartons provided by her addiction to tobacco.

Alice explained the problem in a 1948 paper published by the American Journal of Archeology. “People often say,” she wrote, “ that an unknown language written in an unknown script cannot be deciphered. They are putting the situation optimistically. We are dealing with three unknowns: language, script and meaning.... Forty years of attempts to decipher Minoan by guessing....have proved that such a procedure is useless. Minoan cannot be deciphered, because we do not know if "Minoan" existed....If, as seems probable, it was a highly inflected language, it should be possible to work out some of the inflection pattern.” And she ended that paper with a warning about speculation. “When we have the facts, certain conclusions will be almost inevitable. Until we have them, no conclusions are possible.

After a full day of teaching, Alice would return to her home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, which she shared with her widowed mother. There is no record she ever had a romantic life. Perhaps Alice was gay, or had little sexual drive. But for whatever reason, her life was clearly devoted to Linear B. After dinner and grading papers, she would engage her opponent. Said one writer, familiar with her work, “She suffered no fools. She demanded precision of herself and others. She spoke and wrote in no-frills, spin-free English, direct and blunt, prickly and undiplomatic”.

I wonder what old King Minos would have thought, had he caught a glimpse of Alice around a corner in the labyrinth of ages, her research scattered across the kitchen table, a cigarette balanced on the edge of an ashtray, its smoke curling romantically to the ceiling, as Alice shuffled and rearranged the 186,000 cards she had created, and the symbols and notes they contained. Like an alchemist she was trying to conjure an ancient world out of what came to be called her “Triplets”, three-word sets she had uncovered, with similar suffixes. Figuring out an entire language out of that would be a real magic act. And she darn near pulled out a rabbit

Prophetically, Alice had delivered a lecture on Linear B in 1948, in which she did speculate about the doors which a solution to Linear B might unlock - and might not.. “We may find out if Helen of Troy really existed, if King Minos was a man or a woman...On the other hand, we may only find out that Mr. X delivered a hundred cattle to Mr. Y on the tenth of June 1400BC.” After learning of her terminal cancer diagnosis, Alice wrote to a colleague, “The important thing is the solution of the problem, not who solves it. ” She died on 16 May, 1950, at the age of just 43, with the great mystery of her life unresolved.

The odd thing is, just after the end of the war in Europe, in 1945, Alice had met the solution to the great mystery.  She had traveled to England, to visit with her mentor Professor Sir John Myers. He had arraigned a brief meeting between Alice and a man he thought was a promising young architectural student named Michael Ventris (above). The meeting did not go well. Alice was an academic, the daughter of blue collar parents, respected for her hard won achievements in science and the byzantine politics of academia. Michael was the son of a wealthy family, raised by a mother influenced by the cold and imperial psychiatrist Carl Jung. They were both socially inept to a degree and managed to say just the wrong things to each other. But being socially inept, they did not hold it against each other, and exchanged a few letters over the next five years, all strictly on the topic of Linear B. And oddly, that was where the solution would be found, in the unpleasant pauses in their conversation.

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TOWER OF BABBEL - ONE

 

I offer proof here that there is no such thing as useless information, as illustrated by the fate of the 600 elite German paratroopers who floated down or thudded into rough glider landings on the dirt air field of Maleme in Western Crete, at about eight on the Tuesday morning of 20 May, 1941. 

Six short hours later 400 of them were dead, killed by poorly armed, badly disorganized and under strength New Zealand infantry. And what largely killed those confident well trained, well armed Teutonic warriors was information uncovered forty years earlier and sixty miles to the east, written 4,000 years before men could fly.

The second imperial palace built at Knossos (above) on bronze age Crete was so large visitors got lost in its labyrinthine corridors. It had been built for King Minos, and was occupied for over 400 years. It had hot showers, and flush toilets, and gardens. 

Its walls were adorned with colorful frescoes of sacred bulls, graceful women, and brave men. Its gold came 300 miles from Egypt, its olive oil 100 miles from Greece, its ceder throne, 400 miles from Lebanon. And then about 1375 B.C., this kingdom simply disappeared. Time eventually even wiped out its memory. For most of human history, people had no idea the acrobats of Crete were cartwheeling over the horns of bulls before Moses challenged Pharaoh. Then a British archaeologist went looking for a new meaning in his life.

Little Arthur Evans (above)  - he stood just five feet two inches tall - had always been fascinated with ancient history, but only ancient history. He almost failed his final exams at Oxford because he knew nothing which had happened after Richard the Lion Heart died in 1199 A.D. Evans spent half his life as a dilettante archaeologist, digging about the edges of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. 

When his wife Margaret (above, left) died in the spring of 1893, the heartbroken 43 year old Evans (above, right) went digging with a new purpose. He used his inheritance to buy land already identified as a palace three miles south of the port of Heraklion on Crete.

Beginning in the year 1900, Evans spent six years unearthing the great palace at Knossos. Its murals were so exuberant, its architecture so confident, its wealth so obvious, that Evans was certain it had been the center of a great empire which rose and fell while the ancient Greeks were still barbarians. 

The record of its achievements and soul were right at hand, in the thousand or so mostly broken clay tablets scattered about the palace. But they were written in what seemed to be two unknown languages, younger by a millennium than the cuneiform tablets of Sumer and Babylon, but older by a century than the oldest Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Evans labeled the languages Linear A and B. His obvious choice was to attack Linear B (above) first, since the majority of the tablets were in that language. But the best brains in England, working at Evan's behest,  were unable to read the words. After more than a decade of study the only thing Evans was certain of, was that neither one was Greek. 

After World War One more tablets with the same mysterious pictographic languages were unearthed in the palaces at Pylos, Thebes, Corinth and Mycenae, on mainland Greece. As the number of uncovered tablet shards approached 3,000, the best brains in the world were still unable to read them. How could you decipher an unknown language, once the authors and speakers, and everyone who ever read or spoke the language, was long dead?

For 1,500 years the most insightful method to decipher coded messages and unknown languages was the one invented by the Syrian mathematician Al-Kindi - frequency analysis.  You had to trust this guy. He wrote 262 books. And his method for decoding unknown writing was to reduce it a math problem, by first figuring out what was the most common letter in the language. In English that is "E", and then filling in the blanks. 

 But none of the symbols used in Linear B appeared in any statistically significant variation. The diligent mathematicians Evan's hired simply did not have the resources to crack the puzzle of Linear B. But the effort did provide a good testing ground for new theories, just in time to deal with an ambitious electrical engineer who came up with a great way to get very rich.

His name was Arthur Scherbius, and in 1918 he marketed his new mechanical rotor device under the name “Enigma”. Pushing the letter “e” on Scherbius's keyboard turned a mechanical rotor (above) one spot forward.  There were twenty-six spots on each rotor, so when you entered any letter into the rotor,  the letter produced by that  rotor would be a  totally random letter from the one input, determined only by the original position of that rotor. 

Putting the rotors in sequence (originally three, each translating the input from the rotor before ) would make the code practically impossible to break, unless you knew the starting setting for each rotor. And those could be changed either randomly or according to a schedule.  In 1926 Scherbius sold his machine to the German Navy, and the following year to the German Army, who thought the Enigma codes would be unbreakable.

And they might have been, but in 1928 a minor bureaucrat on the Army General Staff did something stupid. Instead of sending their new Enigma machine (above) to their embassy in Warsaw, Poland in a diplomatic pouch, he sent it by mail. When it failed to promptly arrive, the ranking German officer in Warsaw panicked, and asked the Poles to please look for the package. Intrigued, the Polish postal workers searched for, found and opened the box, and got their first look at the new Enigma machine. Polish intelligence service spent a long weekend disassembling it and building a duplicate machine. Then they carefully repackaged the original and delivered it to the relived German embassy staff.

The Germans had little reason to worry even if they had known. With eight rotors wired in sequence, Scherbius had figured it would take 1,000 technicians using frequency analysis, 900 million years to try every possible combination of keys and rotor settings just to read a single message. And he was right. The Polish code breakers struggled with the machine for a decade, but came up with nothing. Finally in 1939, facing an impending German invasion, the Poles shared their duplicate Enigma machine with British Intelligence. And in 1941, a brilliant English mathematician named Arthur Turing, built his own electro-mechanical machine (above) which could try each of the millions of possible mechanical rotor settings on Enigma in a matter of hours. With that, it became possible to break the unbreakable German codes.

The first use of this British “Ultra Secret” was on 28 April 1941, when their commander on Crete was given details of the coming German invasion. General Freyberg was not certain he could trust this new source, and divided his troops between the sea coast and the air bases, where Ultra said the attack would come. 

But enough men were guarding Maleme airfield on 20 May 1941 to slaughter the German units as they landed. British Prime Minster Winston Churchill pointed out that “"At no moment in the war was our intelligence so truly and precisely informed.” 

In the end it did not save Crete, because the German air force prevented General Freyberg from bringing reinforcements back from the coast. Eventually German air dropped reinforcements swamped the New Zealanders and forced the British to evacuate the island.. The battle cost the British 3,990 dead and 17,000 captured. But it cost the Germans 6,698 dead, and 370 aircraft destroyed. Their decimated parachute battalions never made another large combat drop.

A little over two months before the fall of Crete, little Arthur Evans (above) died in England, still convinced that Linear B was an as yet unknown language. And through the multiplying effect of tenure and graduate students, he was able to reach out from beyond the grave to influence the effort to decode his tablets for another generation. 

The solution, it turned out, had been offered by the 13^th century Franciscan monk and philosopher Roger Bacon, from his study atop Folly Bridge (above). It was in that small room where Bacon had written,  “Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae”, or “Half the answer is asking the right question.”

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