Where the Twain Met

The hundreds of clay tablets found in the ruins of King Minos' palace at Knossos, Crete, and on the supposed site of King Nestor's palace near Pylos on the Greek mainland long provided archaeology with one of its most tantalizing mysteries. The tablets bore two scripts which scholars call Linear A and Linear B. But it was not until 1952--more than half a century after the Crete discovery --that Michael Ventris, British architect and cryptographer, broke Linear B, announced that its 87 "signs" closely paralleled Greek syllables (TIME, April 19, 1954). But what about Linear A? Even Ventris, who died in 1956 at 34, thought that the language on the tablets must be Minoan, now completely unknown.

Last week Cyrus Gordon, professor of Near Eastern languages at Brandeis University, offered a solution to the mystery. Linear A, says he, does indeed use Minoan signs, but these parallel Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) syllables. Just as Ventris' discovery revealed that the Achaeans of the Greek mainland were not the illiterates that a reading of Homer suggests, but might well have been the civilized conquerors of Crete, so Gordon's thesis sheds a whole new light on the possible foundations of Greek civilization itself.

Just a Hunch. Since the Near East used cuneiform and the Greeks and Minoans a linear script, most scholars automatically assumed that there could be no connection between the two ways of writing. But Scholar Gordon, a Ph.D. in Semitic languages from the University of Pennsylvania, had a hunch there was. "When I started this research," he admits, "I was merely setting out to see whether my notion was correct. At first I was frustrated at every turn because I thought that Phoenician--or West Semitic--was the language root. But Phoenician only seemed to fit the puzzle in certain limited instances." Was there another language that would fit better?

Like the Linear B tablets, those in Linear A were obviously the ledgers of bookkeepers. Both used the same kind of numerals (e.g., a vertical line for 1, a horizontal line for 10, a circle for 100), and these would have to be combined with signs meaning "cumulative total," "subtotal," or "amount owed." Furthermore, certain signs in both scripts were similar. In the Linear A word jT/-)+, for instance, Gordon knew (from Linear B) that the sign /= could be pronounced to, the sign '4, lo or ro. That still left two unknowns, which Gordon called Y and X. The big question: Could he find out what the word Y-to-X-lo or -ro meant?

So Many Men. Last month Gordon accidentally fell upon the key he needed. On one of the Linear A tablets he came across the entry gaba, followed by the sign for MAN and the numerals 62. This was a striking equivalent to the Linear B formula to-so MAN 17, meaning so many men: 17. But gaba was also similar to the Akkadian word gabba, meaning all. "From that moment on," says Gordon, "I approached Linear A with Akkadian in mind."

The word Y-to-X-lo or -ro, Gordon reasoned, might mean "cumulative total," and the Akkadian word for that was kitmuru. Since the Akkadians did not distinguish between the o and u sounds, to could be tu, and lo or ro could be hi or ru. Then Y becomes ki, and X, mil, to make kitumuru.

Perfect Fit. Checking his theory, Gordon proceeded to substitute mu wherever the X sign appeared. One Linear A word, thus translated, became muru. the equivalent of the Akkadian mullu. meaning paid out, issued or delivered. To another word with the X sign preceded by the o sign, Gordon applied the Akkadian word umu, meaning day, found that it regularly appeared in date formulas. That meant that the tablets' o sign was equivalent to the Akkadian u. which happened to be and in Akkadian. Once again, Gordon found that his translation fitted in perfectly wherever and might be expected. This, Gordon decided, was proof enough that Linear A is just a Minoan script version of Akkadian cuneiform.

If the theory holds up under the scrutiny of other experts, Gordon feels that scholars will have to take a new look at Near Eastern influence on Crete and Greece. Linear A provides the evidence that Crete had its share of Babylonian tamkam (merchants), who had already made Akkadian the lingua franca of the Near East. Certain literary similarities in Homer and the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, as well as in Plato and the Sumerian "perfect world," could well be more than mere coincidences. "We had always thought of the ancient Greek and Hebrew cultures," says Gordon, "as being independent. Only a few bold scholars had theorized otherwise. My research reveals that they definitely had a common heritage--a heritage which came not from the West or South but from the Orient."

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