The Forum

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Visiting Knossos

I love your magazine, agree with your sensible recommendations on how to curb looting, and approve of your policy of printing photos of ancient mosaics and paintings that might be deemed pornographic today.

Your articles on “The Minoans of Crete: Europe’s Oldest Civilization” (March/April 2004) reminded me that my love of archaeology began with a book on the Minoans I read in 1941. Thirty years later, I spent an afternoon on Crete—the highest highlight of a cruise. Even today, I often find myself dreaming about Knossos: the alabaster throne (how small it seemed!), the wall paintings, the staircase, even the storage jars.

Errata

May I suggest that the next time you publish articles on Crete you consult a map of the island. Mallia, despite your assertion on pages 28 and 34, is not on a coastal plain in southern Crete. It lies, for all the world to see, on the northern coast (as you show in the map on p. 20). Oh, and it’s “Mochlos” (footnote on page 29), not “Mochols.” That said, I love the magazine.

Ruefully, we acknowledge that Mr. Allen is right on both counts.—Ed.

Not up to Your Standard

I’m a big fan of Archaeology Odyssey. I look forward to each new issue, which I read from cover to cover. I’ve just finished reading the March/April 2004 issue, but this time I feel let down. The articles on the Minoans were far too superficial.

A Superb Presentation

Thank you for publishing those great reports on Minoan culture. About three years ago I wrote to you asking about the decipherment of Linear A script. You wrote back saying you had commissioned an article on the latest findings. Well, it took a while, but the wait was worth it! (See Barry B. Powell, “Deciphering Cretan Scripts,” March/April 2004.)

Clearly it is nearly impossible to decipher a script when there are so few clay tablets. What we need is a large cache of writings, as we have for Linear B. Surely there must be more tablets somewhere on Crete.

Did Cyrus Gordon Decipher Linear A?

Barry Powell states that we do not know the “underlying language” encoded by the Cretan Linear A script. In 1966, however, the late Semitics scholar Cyrus Gordon advanced the idea that Linear A recorded a Northwest Semitic language (a category that includes Hebrew, Canaanite and Phoenician). Gordon notes, for instance, that the Linear A word KU-RO (which, according to Barry Powell, “cannot be explained as 008a Greek word”) is derived from the Semitic KL, meaning “all.” Has this theory proved to be erroneous?

Gordon also claimed that there are “virtual bilingual” tablets (for example, the so-called Haghia Triada tablet 31) for Linear A. Is that wrong, too?

Barry B. Powell replies:

We can test a decipherment by applying its rules to a new text, teasing out the underlying language, and then trying to understand the meaning of the text. Many did not accept Michael Ventris’s decipherment of Linear B (some still do not) until a new tablet was published with three signs having the values, according to Ventris’s system, of TI-RI-PO. A sign beside the three phonetic signs clearly represented a tripod, which in alphabetic Greek is tripos. The distinguished scholar Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., accepted the decipherment from this evidence, and most have followed since.

Such results have not been forthcoming on the thesis that Linear A records a Semitic language. Gordon’s example of KL for KU-RO is a stretch. In any event, one example will not suffice; you need a system that unravels whole texts. Linear A might turn out to record a Semitic language, but that is not proven.

Gordon refers to Haghia Triada tablet 31 (HT 31) as a “virtual bilingual.” The tablet has an unusual number of logograms (non-phonetic signs), which, if assigned hypothetical Semitic names for pots, can be correlated with the phonetic signs. But this has by no means led to a decipherment. HT 31 is not a bilingual text; in fact, we have no bilingual texts for Linear B either. I’m afraid that Gordon’s work on Linear A has not been well received by mycenologists.

Egypt’s Debt to Mesopotamia?

I enjoyed immensely your special coverage on Minoan civilization. On one point, however, I find myself in disagreement—regarding Barry Powell’s statement that “Egyptian writing must be derived from the still older Mesopotamian writing.”

Mesopotamians and Egyptians exchanged ideas and goods at a very early date. University of New Orleans professor William H. Stiebing, Jr., among others, cites the physical evidence of trade between Mesopotamia and Egypt during the Egyptian predynastic Naqada II period (c. 3500-3000 B.C.E.). We know, for example, that certain Sumerian ideas and technologies, including the cylinder seal, appeared in the Nile Valley in the late fourth millennium B.C.E. (see Stiebing, Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture [New York: Longman, 2003], pp. 107, 112).

No consensus has been reached by the scholarly community regarding the dating of the inscribed ivory and bone labels from the so-called Tomb U-j at Abydos, Egypt, recently discovered by Günter Dreyer of the German 009Archaeological Institute. If these inscriptions do indeed date around 3400 B.C.E., the earliest date that has been suggested, they would constitute the earliest-known writing. In any case, the Abydos labels are either slightly earlier, contemporaneous or only slightly later than the earliest-known Sumerian phonetic writing.

Even if the Egyptians first knew of writing from Sumerian examples, however, they did not borrow Sumerian symbols or signs but developed their own system. It is possible that the Egyptians borrowed the “idea” of writing from the Sumerians, but that doesn’t mean they copied the Sumerian writing system.

I also disagree with Professor Powell’s statement that “the Egyptian system, unlike the Mesopotamian system, had no local antecedents.” My own research has shown that earlier motifs, designs and symbols found on Egyptian Late Predynastic artifacts (carved slate palettes, decorated pottery, mace heads, amulets, ornaments, figurines, spoons and toiletry items) do pre-date the development of the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system. In other words, many of the symbols used in Egyptian hieroglyphic writing do have local precursors.

Barry B. Powell replies:

I agree with every point made by Professor Arnett in his thoughtful letter. Problems of origin are of course open to different interpretations, but in my view the inventor of Egyptian writing got the idea of writing directly from the Mesopotamians. Both the Mesopotamian and Egyptian systems consist of semantic classifiers, non-phonetic logograms and phonetic syllabograms; they have about the same number of signs; and they work in similar ways.

Because the ivory labels from Tomb U-j at Abydos are not firmly dated—and appear, in any event, to come from roughly the same time as the archaic texts from Mesopotamian Uruk—they do not establish a clear priority. Even if the ivory labels do turn out to be older than the protocuneiform tablets from Uruk, we should still look to Mesopotamia for the origins of writing in the elaboration of a system of accounting by tokens extending back to 8000 B.C. No such antecedents existed in Egypt, where hieroglyphic writing appears suddenly at the end of the fourth millennium B.C.

Reading the Phaistos Disk

Has it ever been suggested that the Phaistos Disk, shown on page 23 of the March/April 2004 issue, was a game board, not unlike the modern “Chutes and Ladders” game now enjoyed by young children?

Re-reading the Phaistos Disk

When I saw the photo of the Phaistos Disk, I immediately felt it was a menu. Each group of objects looks like a meal being served by a slave. The heads with tall hair are definitely not Cretan. However, they could represent servants or entertainers performing during the meals.

She is Really a He

The image on page 18 of the March/April 2004 issue looks like a Minoan man with a jar, not a “Minoan woman,” as your photo caption states. My impression is that in Minoan art the figures with reddish skin are male and the figures with whitish skin are female.

James D. Muhly, the former director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, replies:

I would agree with Tony Orzech. The figure shown on page 18 must be male. In Minoan wall paintings, male figures generally have red skin and female figures have white skin. It is commonly believed that this convention represents something the Minoans borrowed from Egypt (in Egyptian paintings, however, females have yellow skin; the Minoans apparently preferred white). There are exceptions, of course. Look, for example, at the bull-leaping scene shown on pages 16-17 of the March/April 2004 issue. It shows three figures: two have white skin, and one has red skin. I would argue that all three are male, though some scholars would disagree with me.

Minoan Oarsmen

One of the photos on page 35 of the article by James Muhly (“Excavating Minoan Sites,” March/April 2004) shows a detail of a painting of Minoan ships from the West House frieze at Akrotiri. The rendering of the oars on the two ships is peculiar: Each oar seems to be comprised of two parallel arms extending downward from the gunwale, connected to the top end of the oar blade at an angle of about 100 degrees. Since the artist is so precise in representing details, one assumes that the oars are drawn as they actually looked. So how did such oars work?

Shelley Wachsmann of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University replies:

The ships in the photo are being paddled, not rowed. The “parallel arms extending downward from the gunwale” are in fact the arms of the paddlers—though this is difficult to see from the small photo in Archaeology Odyssey. A close study of the paddlers shows that they are bending over considerably, in a manner that seems both extremely uncomfortable and inefficient for ships of this size (see my Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant [College Station, TX: Texas A&M University, 1998], pp. 86-99, 105-122). This is particularly curious because one of the ships in the painting not visible in the photo is indeed being rowed.

In my view, the most likely explanation for this paradox is that suggested by Lionel Casson in his article “The Evidence of the Thera Wall Paintings” (International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 4 [1975], pp. 3-10). These Minoan wall paintings depict deliberately archaic ships that were probably built as part of a cult festival; in other words, the ships represented in these paintings were no longer in use when the paintings were made.

Visiting Knossos
I love your magazine, agree with your sensible recommendations on how to curb looting, and approve of your policy of printing photos of ancient mosaics and paintings that might be deemed pornographic today.