A Companion to Linear B - The University of Texas at Austin

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44 T.G. PALAIMA §12.1.1.2 §12.1.1.2. Alice E. Kober and Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. Some of the results of Evans’ unfinished work on Linear B are found in the pages of his monumental Palace of Minos and in the manuscript for a separate monograph on the Linear B script, a companion volume to Scripta Minoa I, that was edited and published after his death with the title Scripta Minoa II. The incomplete manuscript for this masterwork was left at Evans’ death in 1941 to the care of his life-long friend Sir John L. Myres. Myres, however, was not a scripts expert. He was then seventy-two years old and suffering from failing eyesight. So he sought the help of an American scholar named Alice E. Kober. In the late 1930’s and throughout the 1940’s until her premature death on September 16, 1950, Kober was arguably the leading researcher working on what were then called the Minoan writing systems. 16 By spring 1940, when the eventual decipherer of Linear B, Michael Ventris (born July 12, 1922), not yet 18 years of age, submitted his first precocious article on the language(s) that might be represented in the Minoan scripts, 17 Evans had classified, and even assigned conventional consecutive numbers to, as many of the fundamental signs of the two scripts (Linear A and Linear B) as he could (Fig. 12.4). Ventris in fact used Evans’ ‘sign list’ as a starting point (Fig. 12.9) for his first naïve and undisciplined attack on the Minoan scripts. Alice E. Kober and Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. did the essential work on the palaeography (and analysis) of the Linear B inscriptions. Bennett was entrusted in 1940 with the publication of the newly discovered Pylos tablets (excavated in 1939), 18 while Kober worked systematically on her own from ca 1935 until 1947. Then she joined Sir John Myres in his work on the publication of the Knossos tablets for what would become Scripta Minoa II (SM II). It should be noted that Kober did this work selflessly, abandoning, for the most part, her own well-advanced work at analyzing the Minoan and Mycenaean scripts, because she felt, quite justifiably, that poorly published texts had caused, and would continue to cause, many problems for the serious research work that needed to be done. This explains Kober’s blunt reply to the questionnaire that Ventris sent out in December 1949 to about twenty-two scholars all of whom were known to Ventris to have strong interest in work on these writing systems. 19 She wrote on February 20, 1950, 20 ‘I have no intention of answering the questionnaire. In my opinion it represents a step in the wrong 16 PALAIMA 2003a, 50-57; PALAIMA – POPE – REILLY 2000, 10-14. 17 PALAIMA 1993; ROBINSON 2002; VENTRIS 1940. 18 MCDONALD – THOMAS 1990, 229-243. 19 VENTRIS 1988, 32-35. 20 VENTRIS 1988, 67.
§12.1.1.2 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND PALAEOGRAPHY 45 Fig. 12.9. Ventris’ use of Evans’ numeration of signs for comparison between Linear A and Linear B and conjectured Etruscan/Pelasgic values (after VENTRIS 1940, 510) direction and is a complete waste of time.’ At this point, nearly a half century of scholarly work aimed at unlocking the secrets of these scripts had been thwarted by lack of the kind of thorough and proper palaeographical analysis that would form the basis for trustworthy editions of the inscriptions. Even though she was then terminally ill, Kober had her priorities straight. She abandoned work on decipherment per se in order to set down firm foundations for future palaeographical and related work with Aegean scripts.
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