In 1900, Arthur Evans, an English archaeologist, digging in Knossos on the island of Crete, unearthed clay tablets with an unknown writing system for an unknown language. He called it Linear B, and it wasn’t until 1951 that the tablets were finally deciphered. Recently I read The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox, an account of how the language was deciphered. The book is so well written and so interesting that I actually gulped it down, reading it in pretty much one sitting! Written for a general audience, you don’t need to know about linguistics, puzzle solving, or any language other than English. She walks the reader through the complicated bits and turns the story into a detective tale. There are lots of fun facts in the book, but here’s one that is particularly bookbinding related. One reason the tablets Evans found were buried is that the city in Knossos had been destroyed, probably by fires. The tablets Evans found were clay and the heat of the fire had hardened them into pottery, conserving them for 3000 years. Fox explains that the tablets were meant to be short term storage—at the end of each year the information on them was copied to a more permanent substrate, maybe papyrus, and using water, the clay tablets were melted and reused. Paradoxically, the hardened clay survived, the papyrus didn’t. Linear B is available as a digital font, see below for an example. Fox’s book is really great, I highly recommend it.
In 1900, Arthur Evans, an English archaeologist, digging in Knossos on the island of Crete, unearthed clay tablets with an unknown writing system for an unknown language. He called it Linear B, and it wasn’t until 1951 that the tablets were finally deciphered. Recently I read The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox, an account of how the language was deciphered. The book is so well written and so interesting that I actually gulped it down, reading it in pretty much one sitting! Written for a general audience, you don’t need to know about linguistics, puzzle solving, or any language other than English. She walks the reader through the complicated bits and turns the story into a detective tale.
There are lots of fun facts in the book, but here’s one that is particularly bookbinding related. One reason the tablets Evans found were buried is that the city in Knossos had been destroyed, probably by fires. The tablets Evans found were clay and the heat of the fire had hardened them into pottery, conserving them for 3000 years. Fox explains that the tablets were meant to be short term storage—at the end of each year the information on them was copied to a more permanent substrate, maybe papyrus, and using water, the clay tablets were melted and reused. Paradoxically, the hardened clay survived, the papyrus didn’t.