Who's to say how we find our interests. Is it nature or nurture or does something pass by us when we're young that just happens to stand out? Perhaps we have innumerable talents but only one or two are accidentally watered and pruned and given the nutrients that let them grow.
My mother started her working life as a substitute teacher at a high school one town away from where we lived behind my father's dance studio. Pretty soon she had been hired as a full-time English teacher, quickly became the head of the English Department and ran the library that consisted only of books lining the English classroom. Funds came from somewhere, perhaps actually the State back then, which shows how long ago that was, to build a brand new library building with all the money needed for decades to order and process all the books needed to fill it entirely. She was the natural choice for the job as librarian and so she began a very happy career as the high school librarian and spent the next thirty years doing all that was needed to create the library from scratch. A couple of years ago, not long before she died of cancer, I took her at her request to the funeral of a good friend, a teacher she had known for so long. The baffoon faculty member sitting in front of us, thinking he was saying an accolade for the deceased, stood up and stated how wonderful this teacher was, so much so that the library should be renamed for him. I never got along with my mother but that stupid, insensitive statement made me feel rare sympathy for my poor old mother sitting right beside me. I actually felt her twitch when he said it and there was nothing I could do to fix it. Calling him out for it in the middle of a funeral just wouldn't do. So she and I said nothing about it. I wonder if she realized the ape in front of us was just trying to participate.
So from the time I was very small until around ten or so I hung out in her library when she had to watch me. She would let me figure out how to busy myself while she worked, which my father also did when he was watching me, and in her library there were many things to take my interest, the stacks of newspapers in the back, the angled bins with art prints laminated on to poster board, my very favorite being Fumee d'Ambre Gris by John Singer Sargent, which she let me check out to hang in my room for weeks at a time. I renewed that print so often I doubt many other students ever got to see it. There were all the new books being processed, the card catalogue that was always being added to, piles of cards on her desk to be typed up, the most interesting part the last line, which read, "See also..." Up to this day I think of human memory as what I call "the filing card system", one experience reminding one of another in some odd little way though it may be years and thousands of miles apart.
One day when I was four years old, I suppose a period when she needed to actually give me something to look at, she handed me an old book from her personal library at home and said to look at that. It was a heavy though slim hardback with a worn blue cloth cover. It was called Everyday Life in Ancient Times: Highlights of the Beginnings of Western Civilization in Mesopotamia Egypt, Greece and Rome, written by Gilbert Grosvenor who was the president of the National Geographic Society in 1951 when the book was published. I still have this book. The inside of the front cover has her name in light pencil, Margie O'Reilly and in pen Marguerite O'Reilly and below that her married name, Marguerite Price. The most captivating part of of this book were the many colored drawings of what ancient people in the Mediterranean and Middle East must have looked like when they were going about their daily tasks. She let me keep the book because she said it was clear I cherished it. One picture in particular that I gazed at many times when a very young child was titled with a quote from The Odyssey, "Cherish the Stranger in the House, and Speed Him as Soon as He Has the Mind". It was a rendering of what the Palace at Knossos must have looked like in the second millennium, with a man bringing a chariot in through the gate into the open plaza with Minoan frescoes on the far wall, two men speaking with the Minoan priestess in the foreground. Decades later when I was packing up my own library of books from my den, preparing to put everything into storage so I could move to England to specialize in working on the Bronze Age undeciphered script, Minoan Linear A, I found that book on a dusty bottom shelf. I stopped packing the books and settled down on the rug to look through that old book that I didn't even know I still had and had forgotten all about until I saw it there. I leafed through the pages until I found that drawing I had loved. I sat there wondering if it were this drawing that had led me to the point where I was embarking on a life of work in ancient history or if it had been something I was meant to do from birth, that when I opened that book at four years old it had simply struck a harmonic chord. It's an interesting point of which I have pondered from time to time.
I packed up that book with all the others along with all my furniture and everything else I owned and put it all into storage where it stayed for fourteen years. I got on a plane for England, walked into my college at Cambridge to throw down my suitcases and made for the Lecture Block, which housed the faculties of Classics, Linguistics and Orientals, all of which I utilized during the next four years, the most important being the offices of Drs. John Killen and John Chadwick of the Classics Faculty. I had chosen to apply to Cambridge specifically because I had already taught myself the deciphered script, Linear B, which represents Mycenaean Greek, I knew the history of its decipherment and that John Chadwick had been the philologist who worked with the breakthrough decipherer, Michael Ventris. He was still teaching though only a class here and there, perhaps a seminar or two, but Dr. Killen had been his first student who had done his Ph.D. on Linear B just after it had been deciphered and he was still a full-time instructor. When I had written to the head of the Linguistics Faculty, Peter Matthews, asking if he thought it was a good idea for me to apply, he had written back that he had gone over to see Dr. Killen in Classics and showed him my letter and Dr. Killen had agreed to work with me on Linear A. I was told, though it may not be true, that I was the only student he had ever agreed to work with on Linear A officially. Once I had been at Cambridge several months, I asked a faculty member in the Linguistics Faculty, Viven Law, if she knew why they had admitted me to pursue this unusual goal and if she knew why Dr. Killen had, too. She said they had just had a feeling about me, that though they didn't know me yet, there was something that made them feel compelled to admit me.
I had applied to be admitted to do a M.Phil leading to a Ph.D. within the Linguistics Faculty ("faculty" is the term for "department" at Cambridge) but I was unlucky to have arrived only a year or two after a major change in structure of the degree or so I was told. Forever into the deep past, the degrees were rather customized for each student, those courses could be followed that very particularly suited the educational aims of each student, which could cut across faculties if that was deemed useful. But things had changed a bit and those that disagreed with those changes said that Cambridge was being "Americanized" as the changes had been to standardize every degree by required courses. The consequence was that I had to take the courses and do the work required for them for all of the first year linguistic requirements as well as take courses in the Classics Faculty in Classical Greek, Mycenaean Greek and private work every two weeks on beginning the long preparatory road toward original work on the decipherment of Linear A with Dr. Killen as well as take a highly challenging oral and transcriptions exam in phonetics and the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) required by the new acting head of department, challenging for me because I had been born deaf and although my ears had been operated on, still to this day I have less than normal levels of hearing. Needless-to-say, I blew part of what was required, though I think I'll talk about that on some other day. Today it's going to be about my favorite subject, ancient undeciphered scripts.
I was so lucky to be able to get to know Dr. Chadwick for a couple of years before his death and take whatever seminars and a course that he offered on Linear B. One of my first days there, I encountered him in the hallway in the Classics building. He knew who I was and stopped to greet me. He said that the problem with Linear A was that the corpus was just too small to be able to decipher it. He said, "We just have to go dig up more!" That, yes, is one way to go about it. The other is to take what inscriptions we do have and work with them. But the point was taken; the corpus or the entire body of inscriptions that have been excavated is small and so frequency analysis, which is a common way to go at it, is less than fully useful. Most decipherers up to then chose to work with fourteen signs that were shared in Linear B and the script it descended from, Linear A. Linear A was invented by the Minoan people, the original inhabitants of the island of Crete. Linear B was an adaption by the incoming Greek population from Linear A and there are fourteen signs that, by shape and design, are identical to ones in the Linear A script. This does not mean they share the same values, meaning the same sounds, what most people would term "letters". In other words, does the circle with the cross inside it represent the syllable "ka" in Linear A because that is what it represents in the Linear B script? Perhaps and perhaps not. Either is possible. In the history of scripts that have been adapted or taken from earlier scripts, some have taken the values of the earlier one in its entirety, some only some of the values and changed the values of the rest of the signs and some have been assigned totally different values. But that is where the science was at that time and by and large still is today. In other words, with the arguably seventy-five probable syllabic signs (signs that represent sounds) in the Linear A script and the arguably eighty-seven signs that represent sounds in the Linear B script, in general only fourteen were being used to work on deciphering Linear A.
I met with Professor Killen every two weeks to work on Linear A for the next four years without exception through an often otherwise tempestuous Cambridge experience, leaving the Linguistics department in a major fight, joining the Orientals faculty, doing one of my best courses in the Archaeology Faculty, spending the majority of my time alone in the libraries and finally going to Oxford in my last year for two advanced tutorials. Through it all, even when I was most miserable I was the most myself I've ever felt. I read for my courses and worked on what I needed to do to prepare for the serious challenge of Linear A from dawn til late at night seven days a week for the entire four years, including Christmas, New Year's, my birthday. One Christmas Day, the first year I think it was, the coldest winter I spent in England, the River Cam was frozen, the streets were covered in snow and ice. My room was very cold as the heating of my college always seemed to break just after most of the students went home for the holiday vacation and somehow miraculously came back into fully functional order the day before they all returned. There were minimal victuals offered in the dining hall and we didn't have cooking facilities in our rooms. I pushed my bike walking down to the little grocery store in town, got some bread and a few other things to make in my room as a tiny Christmas dinner and was pushing it back up the hill along a street almost devoid of other people. It was so cold. I had no presents, no decorated tree, no family, no friends yet since it was my first year and I was headed back to my chilly room to study Linear A the rest of the day alone. Suddenly I stopped still in the street and looked around, almost as if it were a paradigm shift. I realized it was the best Christmas I had ever had.
Professor Killen had me prepare for work on Linear A by first reading everything there was on the decipherment of Linear B and to master the script in his and Dr. Chadwick's courses. That took a bit of time. When that was completed, he had me read all the published work to date on attempts at the decipherment of Linear A. Deep into that period, he said to me one day, "Well, now I think it's time you read Carratelli." I said, "Well, yes, I know of his work but it's in Italian." Professor Killen thought a moment and then replied, "Well, yes, but unfortunately we just can't get beyond these things." Starting to slightly panic, I replied, "Yes, well, yes, but I'm sorry but I don't read Italian." He smiled and said gently, "Well, yes, but unfortunately we just can't get beyond these things." Extremely embarrassed I said dejectedly, "Yes, but I don't speak Italian," my ragged educational background looming over me horribly. He just gazed at me smiling. I realized that I actually was going to have to read a book in Italian within the next two weeks along with all my other work. I rode my bike to the University Library and checked out the Carratelli book and yes, the only copy was in Italian. I took it back to my college computer room, signed into email and opened the book. I wrote to Dr. Law in full panic, telling her the problem. I knew she could read Italian but I couldn't ask her, of course, to translate the whole book for me. She replied, well, how about I just type out the first paragraph from the book to her and beneath it write what I thought it might mean. I did that. She replied that what I had translated was exactly what it meant so that was fine and I should just go ahead and read the rest of the book. Later on sometime I asked her why Professor Killen had done that and if he knew I would be able to read the book. She said yes, they both knew I could, it was only I who didn't realize it. That was exactly in a nutshell what Cambridge was like. It wasn't so much challenging as it was an incredible constant wake-up call to finding who you were and what you could do.
A couple of years in, I happened to read a book by Asko Parpola, the great Finnish philologist who has worked on the decipherment of the Indus Valley Script of South Asia his entire career. It had just been published by Cambridge University Press and was titled Deciphering the Indus Script (1994). In it he mentioned one methodology that might be used (fig. 6.11, p. 98), based on Harris, which was to write out inscriptions in a kind of crossword puzzle shape, criss-crossing where signs were identical in various words. In this way, it might be possible to determine the presence of prefixes, infixes and suffixes. I took the passage to show Professor Killen and said I wanted to try it on Linear A. He agreed it sounded fruitful. For the next year or so, I applied the technique to the entire Linear A and B corpora. In effect, it released us from a reliance on sound. No longer were we working with just those fourteen shared signs. I could graph every inscription in the same criss-cross way, whether or not the signs were shared in the Linear B script. We were making real headway with this technique but still were hampered by the limited corpus of inscriptions written in Linear A.
That summer Vivien (Law) arranged for me to housesit for friends of hers in Paris. She had agreed to do it herself but had discovered that she was suffering from breast cancer so asked them if I could do it, instead. Being her close friends and therefore trusting her, they agreed without meeting me. I took with me a letter Vivien wrote to the concierge of the building where I was to live that summer, my books and a few summer clothes and boarded the train. From Cambridge I took the usual train to London, jumped on the tube to another station and from there boarded the bullet train to Paris. Four hours approximately from Cambridge I was standing in the Gare du Nord in Paris. I took a cab that day through Paris to my summer apartment but I never took another cab. I walked all summer through the city and found that summer all my still favorite places. The apartment was in Mouffetard, which is a very old neighborhood hidden behind the Pantheon on the Left Bank. It had a long hallway with French windows and when it was breezy, the floor to ceiling sheers would billow all along the hall. There was a deep lavender bathtub and I could open a window just above it as I soaked as the only view from it was of the rooftops and chimney stacks. One evening in my lovely apartment, I was sitting at the small table in front of the French windows above the street with my Linear A notebooks in front of me. It was dusk and the full moon was rising and swallows were flying around in front of it. From somewhere in the near distance I heard the sound of music approaching. I slightly stood to look down the street. A musician had just turned the corner. He walked down past my building, playing La Vie en Rose on his accordion. I think that was the best moment of my life. Certainly the most relaxing. I sat watching the swallows cross the moon listening to his accordion. I was thinking how we had abstractly increased the corpus of Linear A by no longer being reliant on sound. I thought, what if there were some way we could no longer be reliant even on the sign. The moment I thought of the question I thought of the answer. It is the unusual question which is, in fact, the most difficult to come up with. Once the question is posed, often the answer is nearly obvious. Yes, of course there was something else that could be compared besides the signs: the relationships between the signs. I wrote out a methodology that evening for examining just that.
After a couple of years, we realized that we needed to contact Asko Parpola to tell him that we had been working with a method he had mentioned in his book and ask him how he wanted to be cited if we published the work. I found him on the web and wrote him. He responded with enthusiasm and told me that it was his daughter, Paivikki who had devised the suggested methodology. Not long after that, he happened to be in Cambridge because of their publication of his book. He phoned me out of the blue one wintery Saturday night. He asked if I would meet him the next morning at the Anchor Pub, which was on one of the bridges across the Cam, to show him my work. I agreed happily. It wasn't until he hung up that I realized that no way was the Anchor Pub open on Sunday morning. But he hadn't left a phone number. The next morning, I bundled up for the very cold walk to the bridge by the pub. I was early arriving, the pub was indeed closed so I waited on the bridge in thick coat, mittens and hat, with chattering teeth. From around the corner Asko emerged wearing for a coat only a light windbreaker, which was hanging open. He is, of course, from Helsinki. As he approached me I asked if he weren't cold. "Cold?" he replied, apparently surprised. "It's not cold!" We stood there in the middle of that bridge with all of my notebooks from the past years open on the stone railing, the wind whipping across the pages, but he was right, it wasn't cold at all. I didn't feel the wind, only the thrill of sharing my work with him.
At the end of my fourth year, totally out of money and pushing what little I had left to stay until late August, I finally told Professor Killen that I had to leave, that I was moving to Philadelphia where I had been accepted to do the M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania. He seemed astonished that I was leaving and asked me not to. I said I had no money left, no work visa and therefore no where to stay. He asked how could I leave when we were having breakthroughs, when the work was really getting somewhere. I said I was just too poor to stay. He asked how long I would be gone, how soon would I come back to resume the work. I didn't know how I would be able to come back but I said two years. The M.A. would take two years. Reluctantly, he agreed that I could go. But I knew then that it was unlikely I would be able to return. Poverty when one is a student is a very real thing. I never have returned except once, to visit Vivien Law a few months before she died of cancer. I made an appointment to see Professor Killen but the appointment was somehow mixed up and when I knocked on his door, he wasn't there. He wrote me how sorry he was about that later but after a couple of years of correspondance when we both realized that I was indeed unable to return, our letters diminished. Every single day since I have wished I were back there, working with him, riding my bike everywhere, reading from dawn to dusk. They were beyond measure the happiest years of my life.
